Heipei

A while back I wrote about hav­ing the out­put of “git de­scribe” as your ver­sion-string in your Mac-OS app, only to dis­cover that this doesn’t work that well since the string in the Info.​plist is sup­posed to be an con­stantly in­creas­ing num­ber of the form x.​y.​z.​zzzz, which doesn’t re­ally work with the SHAs git gives you. But since I re­ally wanted that fea­ture I kept search­ing and found a so­lu­tion which seems to work pretty well and doesn’t in­ter­fere with the ver­sion-string.

In­tro­duc­ing a new key to Info.​plist

First of you’ll need an ad­di­tional key in your Info.​plist where your cus­tom ver­sion-string will be stored. I used “CF­Bundle­Git­Ver­sion” and set its con­tent to “GIT_VER­SION”. You can sim­ply do that in XCode.

The build-script

You’ll still need a build-script, like I de­scribed be­fore. A re­ally sim­ple one would be:

VERSION=$(cd $PROJECT_DIR; git describe)<br /> echo -n "#define GIT_VERSION $VERSION" > $PROJECT_TEMP_DIR/revision<br /> touch Info.plistIf that doesn’t work you might need to in­clude some PATH ex­ports above, but I wanted to keep this ex­am­ple to the rel­e­vant parts.

Info.​plist pre­pro­cess­ing

Now you can pre­process the Info.​plist when build­ing your app, using the re­vi­sion-file as a header. This means that your GIT_VER­SION string will be re­placed. Edit your Build-Set­tings like this:

Using the string in the About-win­dow

So, now your Info.​plist con­tains a mean­ing­ful string. You want that to be dis­played to the user when he opens the “About” win­dow, but you don’t want to write your own win­dow. First you have to write an IBAc­tion in some con­troller that’s in your MainMenu.​xib. Then you’ll have to re­con­nect the About-but­ton to that ac­tion from your con­troller, which should look like this:

- (IBAction)showAboutPanel:(id)sender
{
	NSString *gitversion = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] infoDictionary] 
		objectForKey:@"CFBundleGitVersion"];
	NSMutableDictionary *dict = nil;
	if (gitversion)
		dict = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] initWithObjectsAndKeys:
			gitversion, @"Version", nil];

	[NSApp orderFrontStandardAboutPanelWithOptions:dict];
}

So, if gitver­sion is set then the de­fault Ver­sion-string is over­writ­ten with it when call­ing the about-panel, while for Mac-OS the ex­tra-key in your Info.​plist is com­pletely mean­ing­less and to dif­fer­en­ti­ate be­tween ver­sion you can still use a sim­ple in­te­ger. If that was to hard to fol­low just have a look at the com­mit in the GitX-repo.