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Re: git-describe fails with "--dirty is incompatible with committishes" if passing HEAD as argument

From
Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date
Nov 19, 2012, 19:36 UTC
Message-ID
<7vfw45xu4e.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To
<CAC9WiBjw0W4kLCKMj6HhdjAXOJYpDW2Rgncb+06ahjiYOWtZ8Q@mail.gmail.com>
Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com> writes:
Show 8 quoted lines
> Inside the kernel repository, I tried this:
>
> $ git describe --dirty --match 'v[0-9]*' --abbrev=4 HEAD
> fatal: --dirty is incompatible with committishes
>
> If 'HEAD' is removed then git-describe works as expected.
>
> Is that expected ?
I would say so, at least in modern codebase.

"git describe" without any commit object name used to mean "describe the HEAD commit using the better known points" before the --dirty option was introduced.

But "--dirty" makes it describe the current checkout. For example, output from "git describe --dirty" v1.8.0-211-gd8b4531-dirty means "your working tree contains work-in-progress based on d8b4531, which is 211 commits ahead of the v1.8.0 tag". So conceptually, it should not take any commit, even if it were spelled HEAD.

"git describe --dirty HEAD^^" would be an utter nonsense for the same reason.

Previous: Francis MoreauNext: Francis Moreau
Message 2 of 3 in “git-describe fails with "--dirty is incompatible with committishes" if passing HEAD as argument”
  1. Francis MoreauNov 19, 2012
  2. Junio C HamanoNov 19, 2012
  3. Francis MoreauNov 19, 2012

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