This will be useful when building distro packages, because we can set the
version string to the rpm/dpkg/whatever version string, and getter reports
from end users.
$ build/systemctl --version
systemd 239-3555-g6178cbb5b5
+PAM +AUDIT +SELINUX +IMA -APPARMOR +SMACK +SYSVINIT +UTMP +LIBCRYPTSETUP +GCRYPT +GNUTLS +ACL +XZ +LZ4 +SECCOMP +BLKID +ELFUTILS +KMOD -IDN2 +IDN +PCRE2 default-hierarchy=hybrid
$ git tag v240 -m 'v240'
$ ninja -C build
ninja: Entering directory `build'
[76/76] Linking target fuzz-unit-file.
$ build/systemctl --version
systemd 240
+PAM +AUDIT +SELINUX +IMA -APPARMOR +SMACK +SYSVINIT +UTMP +LIBCRYPTSETUP +GCRYPT +GNUTLS +ACL +XZ +LZ4 +SECCOMP +BLKID +ELFUTILS +KMOD -IDN2 +IDN +PCRE2 default-hierarchy=hybrid
This is very useful during development, because a precise version string is
embedded in the build product and displayed during boot, so we don't have to
guess answers for questions like "did I just boot the latest version or the one
from before?".
This change creates an overhead for "noop" builds. On my laptop, 'ninja -C
build' that does nothing goes from 0.1 to 0.5 s. It would be nice to avoid
this, but I think that <1 s is still acceptable.
Fixes#7183.
PACKAGE_VERSION is renamed to GIT_VERSION, to make it obvious that this is the
more dynamically changing version string.
Why save to a file? It would be easy to generate the version tag using
run_command(), but we want to go through a file so that stuff gets rebuilt when
this file changes. If we just defined an variable in meson, ninja wouldn't know
it needs to rebuild things.
