Re: [PATCH] Documentation: changes.rst: add entry for git

[Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Thu, Aug 03, 2023 at 11:07:10AM +0200, Rasmus Villemoes wrote:
> git is obviously used for development, directly and also
> indirectly (via checkpatch, get_maintainer and other helper
> scripts). But it is also invoked during the build to produce the
> `uname -r` string.
> 
> It's useful to have some minimal git version one can expect people to
> use. For now, set a somewhat conservative minimum of 1.8.0, which is
> already more then ten years old.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
> ---
>  Documentation/process/changes.rst | 8 ++++++++
>  1 file changed, 8 insertions(+)
> 
> diff --git a/Documentation/process/changes.rst b/Documentation/process/changes.rst
> index 5561dae94f85..a82c619f4bb2 100644
> --- a/Documentation/process/changes.rst
> +++ b/Documentation/process/changes.rst
> @@ -62,6 +62,7 @@ Sphinx\ [#f1]_         1.7              sphinx-build --version
>  cpio                   any              cpio --version
>  GNU tar                1.28             tar --version
>  gtags (optional)       6.6.5            gtags --version
> +git                    1.8.0            git --version
>  ====================== ===============  ========================================
>  
>  .. [#f1] Sphinx is needed only to build the Kernel documentation
> @@ -189,6 +190,13 @@ The kernel build requires GNU GLOBAL version 6.6.5 or later to generate
>  tag files through ``make gtags``.  This is due to its use of the gtags
>  ``-C (--directory)`` flag.
>  
> +git
> +---
> +
> +When building with CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO=y, the build system uses
> +git to produce a version string of the form
> +6.4.6-00128-gd78b7f406397, which will be shown e.g. by running `uname -r`.

Isn't this optional?  If git is not installed it just will not use git
to determine the local version.

So you should put "(optional)" above on the list of tools.

And also, don't pick a specific version like this unless it is that way
for a reason.  Why not pick a newer one?  Or the last one that the local
version script can handle properly?

thanks,

greg k-h