Best practice for making a project aware of its own branch name and revision number

[Michael Ellerman]

On 9/21/06, Charles Duffy <cduffy at spamcop.net> wrote:
> So -- I have a piece of software which is revision controlled in bzr. I
> want to be able to include a branch name and build number in the
> --version output from this tool -- how can I best do that?
>
> Having a script which runs as part of setup.py (and at startup when
> running out of the source tree) which creates a module (something like
> version.py) containing the relevant variables (such that this module and
> its contents can be imported if available) probably seems most
> reasonable. Obviously, error handling will need to be available for the
> case when the module isn't available or the script is running but bzr
> isn't installed, but that's trivial enough.

I never got around to it, but when someone asked for CVS style
$Keyword$ $Expansion$, it occured to me that a much cleaner way to do
it would be to have an export-hook that did that. So as part of your
build script you do an export with keyword expansion, which can fill
in the version etc.

cheers