This patch helps with something you need the first time you check out a
Bison repository. I've done this two times in my life and had trouble both
times.

I don't really know for sure what the best suggestion would be, but it
seems important to give people some kind of instructions on how to get over
this hump. What I suggest in the patch is to create a .tarball-version file
with a random version number in it.

It would seem a little better if UNKNOWN could be used, or some other
string that makes it obvious that this is a development build. However,
Gnits doesn't seem to allow for that, and the bootstrap instructions are
currently invoking Gnits.

Lex Spoon
commit 4cd497d1b796bb132f5251daa0a030029cbed736
Author: Lex Spoon <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Feb 27 16:47:14 2024 -0500

    Update build instructions regarding .tarball-version

diff --git a/README-hacking.md b/README-hacking.md
index b5647fff..0897c1e0 100644
--- a/README-hacking.md
+++ b/README-hacking.md
@@ -65,6 +65,11 @@ perform the first checkout of the submodules, run
 
     $ git submodule update --init
 
+Override the local version number. Otherwise, the build will complain
+that the version number is UNKNOWN and does not match gnits standards.
+
+    echo 3.9.0 > .tarball-version
+
 The next step is to get other files needed to build, which are extracted
 from other source packages:
 

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