Use version in ./configure script

[Neil J. Patel]

For autotool'ed projects, it would be really useful to have the package version grabbed automatically from the configure script, rather than having to update the recipe every time the version changes.

The issue with this is obviously that some (most?) projects that are autotool'ed don't hold the configure script in Bzr, instead the recipe has a `run ./autogen.sh` line after the checkout. This means that you wouldn't know the version until quite late in the process...

[James Westby (james-w)]

On Sun Sep 20 10:53:38 UTC 2009 Neil J. Patel wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> For autotool'ed projects, it would be really useful to have the package
> version grabbed automatically from the configure script, rather than
> having to update the recipe every time the version changes.
>
> The issue with this is obviously that some (most?) projects that are
> autotool'ed don't hold the configure script in Bzr, instead the recipe
> has a `run ./autogen.sh` line after the checkout. This means that you
> wouldn't know the version until quite late in the process...

I'm not sure that's particularly an issue, we don't currently need
to know the version until after the recipe has finished, so I think
that would be reasonable.

My main concern with this is that I would like to have a solution that
isn't specific to autotools. There's also setup.py and a million other
ways to specify the version.

I recently posted about this to the dailydebs-team list, with no
feedback yet: https://lists.launchpad.net/dailydebs-team/msg00014.html.

I'm keen to do this if we can find an elegant solution that allows
most of the million ways to do it to work.

Thanks,

James

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

My bug-469874 branch puts in place the necessary infrastructure to do this (and uses it to get the version from debian/changelog). Doing it from configure should be straight forward (if you can solve the turing complete aspect of *getting it from configure*).