'abinit --version' prints UNKNOWN when built from a tarball and not from the git repository

[yurivict]

'abinit --version' fails:

$ abinit --version
UNKNOWN

Build instructions don't say anything about how to set version. configure and build succeeds and produce a faulty executable.

Some computations fail as well:

--- !WARNING
src_file: m_hdr.F90
src_line: 3196
message: |
    Cannot find major.minor pattern in codvsn: UNKNOWN
...

Version: 10.0.7 FreeBSD 14.1

[ilygatsika]

What is your output of ~abinit/configure --version ? If the output is UNKNOWN, it is because autoconf sets PACKAGE_VERSION=UNKNOWN in configure, line 584. Maybe it is an autoconf issue

[ilygatsika]

Temporary solution: changing all 'UNKNOWN' occurrences within the configure file to '10.0.7' allows to run computations successfully without the warning and corrects the output when asking abinit version

[yurivict]

The problem occurs in case when tarball is used that isn't a git repository.

You should provide a way for users to specify the version in such case.

Also configure should fail when the version isn't available because otherwise the produced abinit executable is broken.

Workaround: I replaced all occurrences of UNKNOWN with version in config/scripts/git-version-gen.

[ilygatsika]

This occurs (at least) for latest release tarballs (v10.0.3, v10.0.5, v10.0.7) that do not include neither .version nor .tarball-version. Some propositions for completing the docs on how to set the version number:

1. on the top of the source tree, echo "10.0.7" > .version && echo "10.0.7" > .tarball-version and then launching ./autogen.sh before configure

2. how to use existing script config/scripts/update-version-number that lets the user specify version within configure.ac

[jmbeuken]

see : https://github.com/abinit/abinit/releases/tag/10.0.9

[yurivict]

These instructions recommended above fixed this problem in the FreeBSD port:

echo "10.0.7" > .version && echo "10.0.7" > .tarball-version

[tsaihsiaoyi]

I think it might be because some versions of sh don't support this syntax. https://github.com/abinit/abinit/blob/578d1fb2aa42e852bbaf1656c497b5bd85c16d9a/config/scripts/git-version-gen#L197 Consider modifying the syntax to v=$(cat .current_version).