Re: Remote git-describe ?

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Jan 24, 2007, 12:34 UTC
Message-ID: <7vlkjsfvro.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vps94fweq.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Suppose we had such a service on the server side, and you asked
> the server twice and got these (at different times, of course):
>
> 	v2.6.20-rc5-g419dd83
> 	v2.6.20-rc5-gde14569
>
> What useful information can you get between the two?  
>
> Nothing.
>
> The commit object names are like random numbers and 419dd83 may
> or may not be older than de14569.  The "hash" part of the
> output is meaningless for you until you actually have the
> history to poke at with "git log", "git diff" and friends.

Side note.

Also the commit object names (hence "describe" output) do not tell you how far they are from the tag used to describe them.

However, I suspect that we could do better with Shawn's new fangled describe implementation that actually counts the distance between what is described and the tag. We could add "number of commits since the tag" somewhere, to describe:

	v2.6.20-rc5-256-g419dd83
        v2.6.20-rc5-217-gde14569

to say that the first one has 256 commits accumulated since the given tag "v2.6.20-rc5" and the second one has only 217 commits, to get the sense of how busy the development activity is.

Is it useful?  That is something I am not sure.

Side note for side note.

This should be obvious to people who know git, but the above does not mean we can remove gXXXX part from the describe output, becauses there could be infinite number of commits that are 256 commits away from v2.6.20-rc5 tag. v2.6.20-rc5-256 alone does not uniquely identify the commit 419dd83.