Re: [patch] kbuild: Improve version string logic

[Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>]

This is a bit OT, but one last reply.

On Tuesday 06 October 2009, Johannes Berg wrote:
> > AFAIK it would be propagated into the package _name_, where
> > it is allowed. And even if it were part of the package version, it
> > would be in the "upstream" part of the version number, where it is
> > also allowed.
>
> That may all well be true. I wasn't even aware of the distinction
> between debian and upstream part of the version :)

The Debian part is everything after the last dash in a package version.

> I do, however, remember no end to trouble with autoversion and make-kpkg
> so eventually gave up on using it entirely.

Yes, problems with autoversion and make-kpkg I can understand as it makes 
the revision ID part of the package name, which is very simply not where 
you want it [1].

I stopped using make-kpkg for 2 reasons. First of all it is insanely 
complex. And second it used to always do a 'make clean' for every build, 
which meant a huge inefficiency during bisections and builds after minor 
changes; I understand that has been fixed though.

I was happy to discover the kernel's native deb-pkg target. There've been 
some improvements to that in recent kernels that make it quite powerful 
and flexible for building custom kernels as Debian packages.

Cheers,
FJP

[1] The deb-pkg target does the same, so autoversion is not usable with 
that either. What I do is manipulate the output of 'git describe' to set 
an ENVVAR that gets used as package version.