But this isn't about releases (at least in my mind) - hence the suggestion to add the commit date to the version number in git - so a release would have no commit date, interim patched versions would.
I would say that any version string should include the "git describe" output David W described in his response. In general, the commit date wouldn't be very useful. The get_iplayer repository isn't very volatile, so it doesn't make that much difference, but a commit hash is still more useful.
But would a more elaborate version scheme be worth implementing? If you're not sure which post-release version you have, I think the message will always be: go download the HEAD version and be assured you have the latest and greatest. For the very few people who want to track precisely which commit corresponds to their get_iplayer script, I think it's fair to say to them: clone the repo and use Git.
OTOH, automating the distribution of the HEAD version (incl. more precise version info) might make get_iplayer look a bit more user-friendly. It could also provide a hook for the Windows installer to do post-release updates (though I now immediately un-volunteer for that job).
For the sake of argument, let's say you wanted to implement a version scheme for post-release versions of get_iplayer without requiring users to have access to Git and a clone of the repository. One way I can think of to accomplish this:
You could create a cron script or Git hook to munge the get_iplayer script and make it available for download. Either would perform the same function: check out the latest revision of the get_iplayer script, determine the version string with "git describe" (or perhaps a keyword expansion Git filter?), write the version string into the script, and then place the script in a known location so that users could always go to a single URL to get the latest version. This would have to run on the infradead.org server, so I'll leave it to David W to rule on the feasibility of this approach.
A rather hacky alternative might be to equip get_iplayer with the ability to update itself from the Git repository. The commit hash could be written into the script and appended to the version number in the banner text. Maybe I'll have a whack at that during my next redundancy. Shouldn't be long now :}
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