I think that Git solves an imporant problem that those embedded version strings didn't - Git commits are guaranteed to be either unique or dirty. Generating a s

I think that Git solves an imporant problem that those embedded version strings didn't - Git commits are guaranteed to be either unique or dirty. Generating a summary of your repository state should be done early, and included exactly in the artifacts, as should build flags. Google's internal build system included a bunch of build server information, including build time and build host, but importantly it included these variables in every built package as a simple .env file. This env file would cause the build system to "falsely" report all of these things, so you had a reproducible build, even with uniquifying data embedded.