Dear list, I have a GHC source tree in ghc-working. I would like to have a separate build tree in ghc-build, so I did something like this: mkdir ghc-build cd ghc-build lndir ../ghc-working Now, I have two different machines. On openSUSE with git 1.8.0 I get something like this: [killy@xerxes : /dane/uczelnia/projekty/ghc-build] ./configure checking for gfind... no checking for find... /usr/bin/find checking for GHC version date... configure: WARNING: cannot determine snapshot version: no .git or _darcs directory and no VERSION file Despite the warning configure succeeds. On Debian Squeeze with git 1.7.10 the same thing doesn't work: [killy@GLaDOS : /dane/uczelnia/projekty/ghc-build] ./configure checking for gfind... no checking for find... /usr/bin/find checking for GHC version date... fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git configure: error: failed to detect version date: check that git is in your path Does anyone have a clue why this happens? There are probably some differences on these systems with the most obvious one being git version. On both systems however git doesn't recognize ghc-build as a valid git repository ('git status' failes), but on one of them this is only a warning while on another this is an error. Any advice will be appreciated. Janek