Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] describe: Make --tags and --all match lightweight tags more often

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:18:38 -0700

Pierre Habouzit <[email-masked]> writes:

> I would like to see an enhanced information in the documentation so that
> people remember that lightweight tags are not meant to be constant over
> time and that's a bad idea to use them.
>
> What the discussion showed, is that the people don't know about
> annotated tags, and git-describe should have a stub of documentation
> that points to git-tag(1) so that people learn about it.
>
> Apart from that, it feels fine.

The primary mode of operation without --tags of "describe" is about coming
up with version numbers, and as such, it should try to base its output on
immutable anchors as much as possible.  For that reason, I think it should
use "tag " line from the tag object, not the name of the ref, to describe
the committish.  They should match (otherwise fsck would say something
about it) in practice, though...

The patch is about --tags, which is not about such a strict "version
number" generation, but about "come up with a closest ref", so in that
light it feels perfectly fine.