Installing AMUSE from a fork fails

[rieder]

Describe the bug
Run ./setup install amuse-framework from a fork of AMUSE fails, because the tags are not copied over

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

• make a clean fork of AMUSE
• check that the tags are not copied over (git tag)
• try to install it

Expected behavior
AMUSE should install, maybe using the git hash as a version?

[rieder]

thanks to @poojanagrawal

[LourensVeen]

Eh, dangit. I hadn't considered that 😦.

The question here is what to do if we don't have any information on what is the most recent version. A plain hash isn't a valid version in standard versioning schemes. And then something like 0.0.0.dev1+gd887ee51a would be interpreted as a very old version, which may not be what you want either.

One option could be to remove the git automation that puts the version in the VERSION file and just manually put it in there on every release. With the actual version in the repository, it'll get cloned with the rest of the files and everything will just work. We'd have to make sure that we also tag it (so that we can make a GitHub release) and that the versions are in sync. And that git automation is kind of crappy anyway. What do you think Steven?

[rieder]

maybe extract the date from the last commit and use that as a base?