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Comment by timeattack | Hacker News Reader

I'm using similar versioning for pre-build packages, but it's extended with commit information to 1:1 mapping to the source tree:

  local date=$(git log -1 --format="%cd" --date=short | sed s/-//g)
  local count=$(git rev-list --count HEAD)
  local commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)
  echo "$date.${count}_$commit"

Example result:

  20191121.68_84f90ff

It provides user about general information about when program was updated along with specific information for developer for bug reporting. Also, it allows intraday releases.

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You can also just use "git describe" to get more or less the exact same information, which is useful for development releases that are untagged when using versioning schemes like semantic versioning.

It helps to have the versioning ordered correctly, so I'd zero-pad the ${count} variable, like so:

    printf "%s.%03d_%s\n" $date $count $commit

For several packages I maintain, the version number is just $(git rev-list --count HEAD). One monotonically increasing number, nothing else.

(This is for software that does not do updates to old releases. If you do updates to old releases, you need an additional version number component for that.)

In build2 we do something similar for snapshot versioning between releases by incorporating the date and commit id into the pre-release component of semver. The result is a unique, properly ordered version for every commit in a project (we call it "continuous versioning"). If anyone is interested, here are the details: https://build2.org/build2/doc/build2-build-system-manual.xht...

FYI, using `local foo=$(some-command)` does not actually make the variable local.

    main() {
      local count=$(git rev-list --count HEAD)
      echo $count
      foo
    }
    
    
    foo() {
      echo $count
    }
    
    main

prints:

2282 2282

Sure it does, that’s just how locals work (in bash and similar). Try printing it after `main` with and then without `local`.

Ah my mistake

Anyways there are some more subtle caveats discussed in this blogpost I was trying to remember:

https://jmmv.dev/2018/03/shell-readability-local.html

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