Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Tue, 8 Jun 2010 02:13:14 -0700 (PDT) | From | David Rientjes <> | Subject | Re: kbuild: Fix the breakage caused by "improve version string logic" |
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On Tue, 8 Jun 2010, Boaz Harrosh wrote:
> > The patch: 85a256d8e0116c8f5ad276730830f5d4d473344d > Author: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> > Title: kbuild: improve version string logic > > Broke none Linus trees that supply their own version string and > tag system via a presence of a localversion* file at the Kernel's > root subdirectory. > > After This patch. The "+" (plus) is not added if a localversion* > file is present or a CONFIG_LOCALVERSION is configured. >
The only reason the `+' is being appended to your version string is because your scm is reporting that there have been commits to the tree since the last release; for git, that means anything that isn't at a tagged commit.
If you were to create a tarball of your tree, for instance, and distribute it to someone else, there would be no appended `+' because there is no revision history. The `+' being appended simply implies that you're beyond the base kernel version in an scm. The motivation is to be more descriptive about what kernel is being run: the most common case where this comes into play is when someone is running a kernel off of Linus' tree and a bug report incorrectly shows that it is a vanilla 2.6.35-rc2 kernel, for instance.
When we discussed adding this indicator of revision history, we explicitly noted that the `+' is a modification of the base kernel version, not the entire string.
As mentioned previously, you can easily suppress that from being added by using "make LOCALVERSION=-foo" to create a 2.6.35-rc2-foo kernel when you do not have CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO enabled. You already found that you cannot pass an empty LOCALVERSION string, so it must be something to identify itself as unique from vanilla 2.6.35-rc2.
The usecase that you've cited before is your colleagues pulling your git tree and then getting this `+' appended when they really don't want it. Although localversion* files are better than (ab)using the EXTRAVERSION variable in the Makefile, they won't suppress the `+' because your revision history shows that you're beyond a released (tagged) kernel. The solution is to use git-tag to indicate your particular version of Linux that differentiates it from vanilla 2.6.35-rc2 and pass along your version information with either localversion* files or CONFIG_LOCALVERSION if you package your .config as well.
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