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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 10, 2008, 18:18 UTC
Message-ID: <7vwsggl3ep.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20081010171217.GB29028@artemis.corp>

Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@debian.org> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> 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.