Re: suggested feature: someone mails me a blob, git please tell me what it is

["Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org>]

Mike Coleman <tutufan@gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's a suggestion for a git feature, if git doesn't already have it.
> Since git generally doesn't use RCS-style keyword cookies (like
> "$Id$"), it'd be nice to have some other way to identify an installed
> file.  Perhaps you'd want to know exactly what rev a user is running,
> for example.
> 
> It seems like it should be fairly easy, given a blob (the file), for
> git to describe what it knows about it.  For example, it could provide
> a list of commits that it's a part of, etc.  It'd be *really* nice if
> only the output of the sha1sum command on the blob were needed.  (I
> can't recall exactly how git's blob SHA1's are computed--maybe this
> isn't feasible.)

Rather than embedding something like "$Id$" on a per-file basis
use the output of git-describe in your build process to insert the
string into your executable file(s), and then provide a way to let
the user extract it, or insert it with a unique enough pattern that
you can grep for it in the output of `strings`.

This is what git does itself.  We replace GIT_VERSION in git.c
with the output of git-describe during compile time (C preprocessor
macro).  The value can be printed by the user with `git version`.
We also embed it into some Perl scripts.

git-gui does the same thing, but is a Tcl/Tk script.

-- 
Shawn.