Versioned dependencies fail with dev versions and git clones

Problem/Motivation

We have added versioned dependencies to Drupal 7. It relies on the info file having a version. If you use git clone then the version information is simply not there. Also, dev tarballs only have the branch information (7.x-3.x-dev) but not the latest tag (7.x-3.5). You cannot tell if Rules 7.x-2.x fulfills the requirement of Rules ( >= 2.3).

Proposed resolution

Before generating the version = line in the .info file, the packaging script will run git to find the latest tag, and use this to determine the version string. If we are exactly on a tag then we'll use that as the version. If not, then we add a .1-dev suffix. So dev tarballs will contain version = 7.x-3.5.1-dev instead of 7.x-3.x-dev, allowing us to fulfill dependencies like ( > 3.5 ).

To support site builders who use git clones of contributed projects in their sites, we will also add a mechanism to allow core to use a local version of git to determine the version string, as the packaging script does.

Remaining tasks

At this moment everything but check back in two hours ;)

User interface changes

Users will see very little change. They will see 7.x-2.x-dev less times and versioned dependencies will work.

API changes

We do not plan API changes. Unless something relies on

Original report by fago

I try to make use of a versioned dependency for modules relying on the entity API. However, Drupal says the version is incompatible with the version checked out directly via CVS/git, as there is no "version" entry in my .info file. According to [#542202] this is correct. It also says:

Because Drupal core uses a slightly different packaging process than contributed modules, the core modules have a version line predefined. This is an exception to the rule, not the model for contributed modules.

However, adding the version = VERSION line make it accept my CVS/Git version. So, is the documentation wrong and we should add version = VERSION or is this a bug?

Next, I was not able to define a versioned dependency compatible with a d.o dev snapshot containing the version string "version = "7.x-1.x-dev"" at all - I tried stuff like >= 1.x, >=1.x-dev, =7.x-1.x-dev, .. Nothing worked. So what should I declare to have compatibility with >=1.0-beta6 + but also the dev versions? E.g. I'd like (>=1.0-beta6, >=1.x-dev) to work.