I was first trying to clone Julia repository into Mercurial (do you know something so good as TortoiseHg for git?). Everything worked fine till I realized that some conditional code depends on GIT_VERSION_INFO.build_number which was set to 0 because it wasn’t really git repository.
Is it really good thing this dependency on git?
Have a look at TortoiseGit 
Still windows only, isn’t it?
Indeed. I like GitKraken on Linux, especially since you can use it without an account with some ini hackery 
Oh. It seemed good but it is not working without registering to some kind of “social network” 
If you want to use any form of version control, that particular framework will be a “dependency”. So I am not sure I understand the question.
In any case, for released versions you don’t need to deal with git if you don’t want to, just extract from a tarball.
I don’t complain dependency on git (although I don’t like git).
I was just talking about this (I am not sure how long could this link work because git could rebase it ) where in prerelease there is version string enhanced by build_number which is generated by this or this. And in latter case some functionality (sorry I don’t remember which) was silently switched off. I suppose I could not update some packages…
Maybe better to fire error if build_number in prerelease version is -1 ?
Build number could be literally presented in some file and could be changed manually or automatically by some commit hooks. Then you could make appropriate version without .git directory… (which you don’t have if you use hggit)
BTW what will git rev-list --count HEAD "^$verchanged" return in case some heads are rebased?
What? No it doesn’t.
No bash command line tool has ever once asked me to register with a social network of any kind. That’s why I love them. 
But neither does GitKraken, so…
It is working for you without registering account with working mail address?
I just use my Github account. The other option is to have a sign-in with a GitKraken account. Neither of which are social networks. So yes, it requires that you sign in in some way, but even command line git requires authentication… which is really what GitKraken is doing here.
If you really don’t want an account, just there’s ways around it.
Thanks much I could evaluate it now (seems nice for first try).
But I don’t think I could use it regularly by hacking it in this way.