Setting a version number with ldflags

[chelnak]

Hey!

Would you consider using ldflags to allow developers to bake a version number in to the binaries?

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/using-ldflags-to-set-version-information-for-go-applications

It could be an optional parameter for the action coupled with some documentation.

I'd be happy to submit a PR if it's something you think could be useful.

[chelnak]

Here is a version of your bash script that I am using to achieve the above:

https://github.com/chelnak/gh-environments/blob/32d3ee6f12638a6f8ab5577ba89b838254abd0b7/build.sh

Resulting in a binary that has a version number

[MdAbulHossain1]

@josebalius

[mislav]

@chelnak It's a solid proposal, but I'm thinking of a better solution to having each individual extension bake their version number in: since GitHub CLI knows the version number (or git SHA) of every extension installed, how about making a change to GitHub CLI so that gh <extension-command> --version just returns the installed version without ever consulting the extension executable itself?

[chelnak]

That could be really neat!

I'd actually forgotten about this PR and ended up using goreleaser for my extension.

I wonder what happens if the extension wants to check for version updates. It's handy having the current version within the context of the app for this purpose..

You could call back in to the main cli with the SDK I guess.. or even implement a helper method.

What do you think?