autoreconf can cause very odd version strings

[jasontibbitts]

While testing some packaging work I found that master -V was showing this rather bizarre string:
cyrus-imapd 2_3_16-6_fc14-112-g5a7ae23-dirty-Fedora-RPM-3.0.1-1.fc27

Turns out that the Fedora package has always run autoreconf, and when that happens it will ignore PACKAGE_VERSION and instead try to find the nearest enclosing git repo and pull the last tag from that. But Fedora package git repos don't really have tags; the only ones in there are from when we converted from CVS many years ago. And that's what gets used.

I ended up changing things so that the package is always built in a fresh git repo with no tags, because that's something our packaging tools do to make it easy to rebase stacks of patches. This results in a version of "unknown" which I guess is a little better.

For now I'm not running autoreconf. That should be fine as long as I don't have some reason to change configure.ac. Is there any way to avoid or override this automatic version determination? (Of course if I have to rerun autoreconf I might as well patch things to not do this, but I'd rather avoid patching if possible.)

[elliefm]

I think I could possibly make the distribution include a file containing the canonical version of that distribution, and have the autoconf infrastructure prefer the version string from that (and fall back to git describe if it's missing).

[elliefm]

I think this is done now, 216934c is the commit on the cyrus-imapd-3.0 branch.

[jasontibbitts]

This does appear to work. I created a VERSION file containing "3.0.1" and ran autoreconf and the final version was as expected instead of being set to 'unknown'.

[elliefm]

Cool :)