Tags missing from dependency repos

[pjaclark]

Repos like riak_kv are missing tags, and rebar.config from riak uses the branch for dependency. This results in no version numbers on the internal applications reported via riak admin status (i.e. riak_kv_version : <<"0.0.0+build.3998.ref5ed22c4d">>).

This also means that a build for Riak KV 3.2.0 done today is different from a build of Riak KV 3.2.0 done last year (as it uses the updated code in the 3.2 branch).

Can we bring back tags for versions for future packages? I.e. OpenRiak 3.4 releases onwards.

[pjaclark]

This also means that people building from source will be compiling a different version of the code (as it takes from the branch and not a tag) depending on when they built it.

[martinsumner]

Full rebuilds of Riak, using a formal release tag in OpenRiak/riak, will use the rebar.lock file - and this is based on commit references not tags/branches. So this shouldn't represent a build consistency issue (as long as you're not trying to package a specific sub-component).

We stopped tagging the sub-repos, because of the overhead it added to the release process (and it was a big source of mistakes leading to re-release requirements).

The reference <<"0.0.0+build.3998.ref5ed22c4d">> still contains the commit reference (OpenRiak/riak_kv@5ed22c4), so you can tell precisely what version the sub-repo is.

Is the better answer here to change the riak admin status output to drop the misleading report of the 0.0.0 tag and instead just report the commit?

[martinsumner]

The code which fetches the version information is here: https://github.com/OpenRiak/riak_kv/blob/fe9d3ab121acb0694ddd6cb23e4e0d8f837194eb/src/riak_kv_stat_bc.erl#L198-L200

The tricky thing if we want to change this, is that we would have to parse the undocumented Vsn string in https://www.erlang.org/docs/28/apps/kernel/application.html#which_applications/1.

[martinsumner]

Correction - the actual situation is different.

The version that was reported previously in riak admin status is NOT always the git tag.

If we build riak-3.2.5, this reports:

hyper_version : <<"1.0">>

However, there is no such tag on the git repo. However, there is a vsn set to "1.0" in the app.src

For poolboy it reports

poolboy_version : <<"riak_kv-3.0.0+build.138.ref825b6d0">>

In the case of poolboy the vsn in the app.src is set to git. So in this case it takes the last available tag, and indicates the actual commit used (which is well beyond the tag).

So there is some process to determine what is reported here, and in some cases it could report something that looks like a tag, but isn't actually a tag (or the tag from which it was built).

So I assume that using git as vsn in app.src file looks at the commit, and if the commit is a tag reports the tag, and if it is not it reports the last tag plus the commit reference? However, we don't consistently use git as the vsn, and also now have repos following the repo detachment that have no historic tags - and so report "0.0.0" as the last tag.