Versioning is frustrating

[squarewave]

I'd like to bake versioning into the build process. Does that sound like a good idea? I was thinking something like

# display current version:
make show-version

# update version:
make increment-version [MAJOR | MINOR | PATCH]

Which would update a version.h file somewhere and call git tag with the new version.

[jacobbenlewis]

Did we determine that automatic versioning from GitHub was not a viable option?

[squarewave]

Well github "automatically" versions by listening to the tags you put on things with the git tag command. Also there's no way for it to version such that we could see it in the console. If you look at the releases link at the top of this repository you can see that it's creating snapshots based on the tags we have in there (which I made and which are mostly incorrect...)

[jacobbenlewis]

What about something like this:
http://cd34.com/blog/programming/using-git-to-generate-an-automatic-version-number/

I haven't looked it over very carefully so I don't know if it's appropriate, but maybe there are other options too?

[squarewave]

Hmm, yeah that seems more or less like what I was getting at. I'd like to make our solution cross-platform if possible.

This does bring up another issue, though - how do versions work when you merge two histories together (say, if I want to do some work in a separate branch and then merge it in)?