Version numbers are an amazing thing. They make it trivial to figure out whether or not a program is at the most recent version, and there are even some relatively sane standards such as semantic versioning which the Clojure community has adopted as the standard format for version numbers.

As a git flow adherent, while my branching strategy may be elegant I often find that I neglect my version number bumping. This repo represents one lazy evening's solution thereto: a VERSION file bump script in Python and a pair of git-hooks scripts which leverage that file to generate auto-commits that bump the version file so you don't have to.

This setup uses two hooks - the post-commit hook and the post-merge hook.

• post-commit - "patch" bump (+ 0.0.1)
• post-merge - "minor" bump (+ 0.1.0) when merging to non-master branches
• post-merge - "major" bump (+ 1.0.0) when merging to "master"

The idea clearly being that, when combined with git flow, the result will be a sane and strictly increasing version number indicative of the state of the project.

The file bump.py must be located on your path.. I use ~/bin. The files post-merge and post-commit must be added to the .git/hooks folder of any and all repos which use this strategy.

First of all, this tool will at present generate a boatload of auto-commits as for every commit it will add a subsequent [auto] commit that increments the patch number. Second of all, the version number is a naive counter in the extreme and is quite likely to encounter conflicts and collisions between banches.

This will be mitigated by the fact that merges will generate an [auto] with a minor version bump so under git-flow the MASTER branch will step by 1.0.0 once conflicts with minor and patch version numbers are resolved. The DEVELOP branch will step by 0.1.0, again because conflicts with the patch number will be squashed when merging into the development branch, and finally the individual FEATURE branches will walk by 0.0.1 blithely independant of one-another.

So basically it may fill your repo with junk, but it'll be useful junk.

Copyright Reid McKenzie 2012, made available under the WTFPBL for your enjoyment.