GIT-VERSION-GEN: do not force abbreviation length used by 'describe'

ramsay-jones · gitster · commit a7659747c2ee · 2016-12-06T10:08:31.000-08:00
The default version name for a Git binary is computed by running "git describe" on the commit the binary is made out of, basing on a tag whose name matches "v[0-9]*", e.g. v2.11.0-rc2-2-g7f1dc9. In the very early days, with 9b88fce ("Makefile: use git-describe to mark the git version.", 2005-12-27), we used "--abbrev=4" to get absolute minimum number of abbreviated commit object name. This was later changed to match the default minimum of 7 with bf50515 ("Git 1.7.10.1", 2012-05-01). These days, the "default minimum" scales automatically depending on the size of the repository, and there is no point in specifying a particular abbreviation length; all we wanted since Git 1.7.10.1 days was to get "something reasonable we would use by default". Just drop "--abbrev=<number>" from the invocation of "git describe" and let the command pick what it thinks is appropriate, taking the end user's configuration and the repository contents into account. Signed-off-by: Ramsay Jones <ramsay@ramsayjones.plus.com> Helped-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
diff --git a/GIT-VERSION-GEN b/GIT-VERSION-GEN
@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ if test -f version
 then
 	VN=$(cat version) || VN="$DEF_VER"
 elif test -d ${GIT_DIR:-.git} -o -f .git &&
-	VN=$(git describe --match "v[0-9]*" --abbrev=7 HEAD 2>/dev/null) &&
+	VN=$(git describe --match "v[0-9]*" HEAD 2>/dev/null) &&
 	case "$VN" in
 	*$LF*) (exit 1) ;;
 	v[0-9]*)
