Imagine you are building gnupg components in some directory which somewhere higher up the path is a git repository.

We're seeing issues where the git version checks in configure.ac are finding outer git trees when building from tarballs of gnupg components and we reautoconf. In your newer git versions several of the issues are resolved by the commits around how VERSION is handled. These now check for ./.git/ in autogen.sh which avoids issues.

pinentry and gpa simply call "git describe" from configure.ac and whilst there have filtering on matches, they can run on a parent git repo which isn't the intended use. Could those repositories also be fixed to check for ./.git/ in the source tree before deciding they're git versions.

When we had an unresolved index in the outer git repo, we even saw components failing to configure due to these commands erroring and causing all kinds of weird looking errors.