meta-oe currently has gitpkgv.bbclass that was brought in from OE-Classic, which allows the package version to be derived from the git repository itself: http://cgit.openembedded.org/meta-openembedded/tree/meta-oe/classes/gitpkgv.bbclass It has been requested that this class be merged into OE-Core; however a more desirable solution is for functionality not already covered by SRCPV to be provided out of the box with the git fetcher. A suggested outline of an implementation has been posted by Richard: http://lists.linuxtogo.org/pipermail/openembedded-core/2012-February/017070.html
The old linuxtogo link above is broken; I believe this is the post I was referring to: http://lists.openembedded.org/pipermail/openembedded-core/2012-February/056023.html
So some patches got merged a couple of years ago that looked like they might address this: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=f03e108fb15aae76d4b6258658e6d540540214f2 http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=5170177719a93a69cc6c7c1218b3f26eed82d6e0 Not having ever used the gitpkgv class I can't say whether this resolves the issue, but it has received some attention since this bug was last touched.