Thanks for your explanation. Indeed i was not really aware of commit counter as the first number, even if i used CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO=y for a while now.
The obviously outdated Kconfig help of CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO told me: A string of the format -gxxxxxxxx will be added to the localversion if a git-based tree is found. The string generated by this will be appended after any matching localversion* files, and after the value set in CONFIG_LOCALVERSION. (The actual string used here is the first eight characters produced by running the command: $ git rev-parse --verify HEAD which is done within the script "scripts/setlocalversion".) Maybe you can integrate parts of your comprehensive answer into this help text, as it will fit better than my awkward English %-) Tnx & best regards, Oliver On 11.12.2012 19:57, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 5:06 AM, Oliver Hartkopp <socket...@hartkopp.net> > wrote: >> As the automatically generated git version information is misleading in the >> merge window, name the kernel in the merge window as 3.8-merge . > > This really doesn't help. > > 90% of the commits during the merge window wouldn't be based on that > Makefile change anyway, but on some much older version. So when > bisecting, for example, you'll see Makefiles with much older version > numbers, even though the commits got merged into the 3.8 merge window. > > Also, we have code to generate the version number automatically. In > particular, I encourage people to use git trees and > CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO=y, because then your /var/log/messages (and > uname -r) will contain the exact git version of your kernel. So when > you see something like > > Linux version 3.7.0-rc8-00041-gcaf491916b1c > > in your message log, you'll know that the kernel you were running back > then was 41 commits past -rc8, and had git commit ID of caf491916b1c. > And that is really useful for things like bisections ("Ok, I know it > worked three days ago - what kernel was I running then?") much more so > than a Makefile change would be (never mind how unreliable the version > info in the makefile is). > > So this is why we only change the version in the Makefile when we do a > new tagged release. > > Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/