The first line now contains a git format tag asking git-archive to
place the last commit's commit date and the last commit's abbreviated
ID respectively. The makefile will use these information in preference
when they're available and git is not available.
Now it's only necessary to add the two following lines in
.git/info/attributes to have the files automatically filled by git-archive :
SUBVERS export-subst
VERDATE export-subst
The version does not appear anymore in the Makefiles nor in
the include files. It was a nightmare to maintain. Now there
is a VERSION file which contains the major version, a VERDATE
file which contains the date for this version and a SUBVERS
file which may contain a sub-version.
A "make version" target has been added to all makefiles to
check the version. The GNU Makefile also has an update-version
target to update those files. This should never be used.
It is still possible to override those values by specifying
them in the equivalent make variables. By default, the GNU
makefile tries to detect a GIT repository and always uses the
version and date from the current repository. This can be
disabled by setting IGNOREGIT to a non-void value.