Script 'update_version' is missing from downloadable tarball / zip-file, even when present in repo... about opus

[bidafiwoc]

Continuing to investigate this... This bug is not only confined to tarball releases of tagged versions, but is also present in the tarball release of the current commit when downloaded from github.com:

wget https://github.com/xiph/opus/archive/master.tar.gz
tar xvzf master.tar.gz

Invoking autogen.sh on resulting directory will result in a configure file that defines environmental variable VERSION as unknown. External xiph packages, such as opus-tools which rely upon version checks of libopus continue to therefore fail autoconf checks.

Bug is not present when entire git repo is cloned from github (for reasons explained in above post).

Above tests are on system with git version 2.1.4, autoconf 2.69, automake 1.14.1, and libtoolize 2.4.2 (in other words, a standard Debian stable [Jessie] system).

Appreciate your input. Incidentally, I can come up with patches that fix this, through modifications in configure.ac, but perhaps they would come at the expense of other corner cases in the logic of the libopus build system. Therefore, I thought it best to get your input prior to implementing them, and filing a PR.

[rillian]

Github's auto-tarball feature doesn't properly support GNU autotools. What's supposed to happen is that release tarballs are created with make distcheck which will build the configure script and Makefile templates and pickle in the git version. Github's tag-based tarballs are just the raw contents of the repository, and the configure script assumes in that case it will have the repo history to query for a version string. I'm not sure why github doesn't include update-version in their tarballs. If you can figure out how to change that, or turn off the tarballs, I'd be happy to do that.

I think it's possible to upload builds to github somehow. If we'd mirrorred the official release tarballs (e.g. https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/opus/opus-1.1.2.tar.gz) on github would that have helped? Would you want an equilvalent tarball of the master branch?

[mark4o]

I think that update_version is excluded by git archive because it is listed as export-ignore in .gitattributes.

[rillian]

Aha, thanks!

I think just removing the export-ignore attribute doesn't help, since configure falls back to 'unknown' without it. Perhaps the question is whether we want to restore the fallback to a hard-coded version in version.mk like the windows build uses for this, or rely on make dist only to get this right.

[jmvalin]

So anything reasonable we can do here, or should we close this?

[wiiaboo]

It was decided somewhere (IRC?) that git archives wouldn't be supported, since there's no .git directory to obtain the versions from.