Subject: Re: [PATCH] doc: enhance git describe --tags help

From: Andreas Ericsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:09:16 +0200

Uwe Kleine-König wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 08:01:27AM -0700, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
>> --tags::
>> 	If a lightweight tag exactly matches, output it.  If no
>> 	annotated tag is found in the ancestry but a lightweight
>> 	tag is found, output the lightweight tag.
> IMHO --tags should behave as Erez expected (because it's what I
> expected, too).  As --tags currently behaves it's only usable in very
> rare cases (most of the time it only makes a difference on repos without
> any annotated tag).
> 
> When do you pass --tags?  Only if a lightweight tag is OK for an answer.
> And then I would prefer a "near" lightweight tag to a "farer" annotated
> one.
> 

The reason lightweight tags aren't considered is that they're often put
somewhere to just mark some refs one wants to keep around, or as a sort
of movable snapshot marker (we have "latest/build", "latest/tested" etc
as lightweight tags). It's nifty to use lw tags for that since they can't
be committed to by accident. That doesn't mean we want 'git describe' to
start outputting "latest-build" whenever we want to pull a version number
from it though.

This was especially true before the creation of "git stash" and the reflog,
but quite a lot of people still use them for similar purposes.

In short; "git describe" output stays the way it is, or things will start
unexpectedly breaking for quite a lot of people.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   [email-masked]
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231