Re: Tag cleanup

[Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>]

>>>>> On Thu, 9 Jan 2014, Eric S Raymond wrote:

> 2. What form do we intend to use for the value of
> emacs-repository-version? The choices are raw SHA1 or git describe
> format; others are theoretically possible but it is normal git
> practice to choose one of those two. I advocate the latter as I
> think the format is more informative to humans.

In Gentoo, we have a "live" ebuild for Emacs that fetches from the
upstream VCS repository. When fetching from git, we use shallow clones
by default, because history is not interesting for this use case.

Obtaining the raw SHA1 (with "git rev-parse HEAD" or similar) will
still work for shallow clones, while "git describe" won't.

There's a related downstream bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/489100
Quoting from there: "Is this really worth non-shallow fetches? We're
talking about increasing overhead seriously for the sake of pretty
version string." I'm passing this question on to you. ;-)

Ulrich