Describe the feature

I notice that the core binary does not have the version compiled into it.

This begs the question: when did I build this binary and is this the latest version? There is no way to tell.

So I propose a simple method which I've recently devised to compile the version into the binary.

Relevant code

it's possible to get the informaton regarding the latest commits to a branch of this repo (for example main) with go list ; example:

$ go list -m -json github.com/cogentcore/core@main

{
	"Path": "github.com/cogentcore/core",
	"Version": "v0.3.8-0.20241213221857-7f699071cef2",
	"Query": "main",
	"Time": "2024-12-13T22:18:57Z",
	"GoMod": "/home/user/go/pkg/mod/cache/download/github.com/cogentcore/core/@v/v0.3.8-0.20241213221857-7f699071cef2.mod",
	"GoVersion": "1.22",
	"Origin": {
		"VCS": "git",
		"URL": "https://github.com/cogentcore/core",
		"Hash": "7f699071cef2f7365f35c8b470e4066a8ce3b0cc"
	}
}

The above should be executed in a subshell to set a variable at compile time via -ldflags= -X ... - in a library to be created. This can be, for instance pkg/buildinfo or, I might even suggest putting a file like core.go in the root of this repository where that can be set.

So, for instance, instead of:

go install cogentcore.org/cmd/core@main

one might run

go install -ldflags=" -X github.com/cogentcore/core.buildInfo=$(go list -m -json github.com/cogentcore/core@main)" cogentcore.org/cmd/core@main

and there should perhaps be some init function to parse the version and commit out of the json set in that variable at compile time.

then cmd/core would just import "github.com/cogentcore/core" or "cogentcore.org/core" and then add a -v --version flag to the command line interface to print the version. And printing the version in the --help menu by default never hurts either. And it will still work without setting the version, just default to unknown version if the variable was not set on compilation.

...

I may submit this as a PR - if it would help. I thought of this for another project for which the versioning is more critical a concern ; so i'll be implementing it there already.