HOWTO: see what changes during updates from git and can we find old versions ?

How do we see if and/or which software changed?

Version tags from git describe are in /var/log/bliss for the core part of bliss:

2021-11-24 10:02:58,855 ... 1.9.0+78-g32a952c43
2021-11-24 10:08:07,113 ... 1.9.0+155-g7dba5318e

Those strings mean something to git diff on the local machine:

git diff 1.9.0+78-g32a952c43 1.9.0+156-ga93013ef1

My questions:

• are these tags meaningful here on gitlab and are they going to get preserved in the future ?
• do those tags survive after history rewrites ?
• what about the version for beamline configuration yaml (etc) files ?
• what about the version of packages in the conda environment ?
• what about the version(s) for the script(s) imported during setup ? Are they even in git ?
• what about the system packages from puppet ?

This is mainly to make it easier for debugging, but there is also a theory about "FAIR" principles where the "R" is for aiming to do "Reproducible" research.