Re: [9front] [PATCH] embed git head hash as /dev/head

[Jacob Moody <moody@mail.posixcafe.org>]

On 6/10/22 08:07, ori@eigenstate.org wrote:
> Quoth Jacob Moody <moody@mail.posixcafe.org>:
>> This embeds the current commit hash for HEAD
>> in to devcons as /dev/head. Thought this could be
>> handy, curious to hear what others think.
>>
> 
> not a fan.

Fair enough, but I did want to talk a bit about what the
use case for this is.

> 
> usually, my kernels have some uncommitted local patches,
> and are sometimes built outside of /sys/src

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that a majority of
users don't have uncommitted local patches to the kernel.
I view this mostly as something that could assist it debugging,
a lot easier to know what code someone has running in their kernel
if you know what the base commit was at least. I've run in to
a number of users that were unaware of needing to update their
kernels. This gives a concrete answer of 'how out of date is the
kernel'. But this is all fluff, just thought it might prove
useful.

> also, it feels overfit to git.


Wasn't aware we shipped with other version control software :P.
Some improvements that could be made to this:

* We could check for a local .git and use that over the one in /dist if found
* We could record the tidiness of the tree, perhaps either through a 'dity' suffix
to the hash and/or just embedding the entire code diff itself.

But I wont invest more time in to this if people don't like the
idea.


Thanks,
moody