Hi,
Eugene Kirpichov
I'd like my program to print something like "this is $program 1.0.4 git 45fea6b" when invoked with --version, or at least just the 1.0.4 part.
Here's some proof-of-concept code we use slightly modified in production here for over a year now successfully: https://gist.github.com/656738 The primary goal was to have a reliable version number (allowing to find the exact corresponding git-commit in the source-code repository), and to be able to detect when that version number is unreliable (there's nothing more annoying than wasting time debugging the wrong source-code...). The idea is to dynamically infer and overwrite cabal's version when building from the git repository, and have it accessible via the cabal's auto-generated "Paths_<pkg-name>" module Data.Version... ...and when creating a source-dist, via "runghc Setup.hs sdist" the current dynamic git-version string is embedded into the generated .tar.gz's .cabal file, so that the source-distribution is just a plain simple .cabal project (that could be uploaded to hackage) hth, hvr --