Previously, the interim version indicators (commit, date, and branch)
would go away on development builds if git didn't exist. And if it did
exist but provided blank output for whatever reason, that was almost
exactly the same as not having them at all (save for the window title
saying "VVVVVV []" which can be easy to overlook). This was bad because
it complicates troubleshooting when you potentially have an unofficial
or in-development build since those get distributed around or compiled
by some people frequently.
Now, there will always be an interim version indicators unless the game
is compiled with -DOFFICIAL_BUILD=ON. And if the indicators are blank
for any reason, they will just be replaced with placeholder defaults so
they will still show up.
Whenever I'd compile on Windows, I'd see the literal text "%cs" in the
main menu instead of the commit date. I never thought much of it (at
least it runs, and the date only shows up in development builds). Now
that I've also seen a screenshot from Terry with it, I decided to look
into it further. Looks like it's a format string that our gits on
Windows aren't recognizing for whatever reason - probably because
they're too old. I have git version 2.23.0.windows.1, and checking its
help page for `git log`, under PRETTY FORMATS, %cs is missing as an
option, while some other options are still there. So the option was
probably added sometime between that version and 2.34.1, which is the
one I have on Linux, where %cs does work.
Luckily, %cd with --date=short seems equivalent, and better supported,
so we can just use that instead.
This is useful for developers who may have multiple builds of the game
from various different branches and may easily forget which build of the
game is what.
This shows up in the bottom-right corner of the title screen and also
with the `-version` command-line option, and in the status message
printed when building the game.
The commit hash is now properly updated every time it gets changed, and
not just when CMake gets re-ran.
For this to work, we need to use a few CMake tricks. We add a custom
target with ADD_CUSTOM_TARGET(), which is apparently always considered
out-of-date (but I had to add a BYPRODUCTS line to get it to actually
work), and we use the target to run a .cmake file every time we build.
Also, VVVVVV needs to depend on this custom target, to ensure that the
game gets built AFTER the version gets generated - otherwise there'll be
an error. So we do an ADD_DEPENDENCIES() after the ADD_EXECUTABLE() for
VVVVVV.
This file, version.cmake, is just the Version.h.out generation that I
added previously, but the important thing about all of this is that if
the contents of Version.h.out doesn't change, and thus if the commit
hash hasn't changed, then CMake will never recompile and relink anything
at all. (At least with the Ninja generator.)
On a small note, since the Version.h.out generation is now a separate
script that is guaranteed to get ran on every single build, while the
Git FIND_PACKAGE() gets ran only at configure time, it is possible for
the cached path of the Git executable to get out of date. Fixing this
requires a simple re-configure (ideally), but in case it wasn't fixed,
the INTERIM_COMMIT and COMMIT_DATE variables would get set to empty
strings instead of containing a value. To prevent this from happening,
I've removed ERROR_QUIET from the EXECUTE_PROCESS() calls in
version.cmake, because it's better to explicitly error if the Git
executable wasn't found than implicitly carry on like nothing happened.
