Confused about "ident" filter

[Peter Karlsson <peter@softwolves.pp.se>]

Hi!

While convincing my employer to convert to Git, I've ran into the old
RCS keyword expansion problem again. They have files that they need to
export to a customer, without revision history, but they need to embed
an identifier that can tell them which version of the file it was.

So, I tried setting up a .gitattributes file:

   * ident

and a simple test perl script that would show me the ident:

   #!/usr/bin/perl
   print 'I am $Id$', "\n";

but I cannot figure out how to get it to actually expand the $Id$. I
tried doing "git checkout test.perl", I tried "git clone" to get a new
copy of the repository, but still it showed only "$Id$".

I found that "git archive" *does* work.

-- 
\\// Peter - http://www.softwolves.pp.se/