Martin Langhoff schrieb:
For the outside of the SCM case, keyword subst is useful indeed if
someone has a $version_unknown tarball, unpacks it and hacks away. It
is a pretty broken scenario, and less likely to happen nowadays with
easy access to SCM tools.
If you still have the tar file, and if it has been created using
git-archive or git-tar-tree it may contain the commit ID in an archive
comment. You can use git-get-tar-commit-id to extract it in that case.
This won't work with official git project tarballs btw., as commit ID
embedding has been turned off. The reason is that older tar versions
extracted the comment as a regular file, which confused users.
René