Re: gitattributes export-subst and software versioning

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 9, 2021, 20:42 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqpn190y8a.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <4f65f02c-1d16-aa2c-3e7b-28d807b9ebe9@archlinux.org>

Eli Schwartz <eschwartz@archlinux.org> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

>> And replacing the flags with a commit slab doesn't seem to be enough,
>> either -- I get good results lots of commits, but for some git log with
>> the new placeholder would just show some nonsensical output, as it
>> seems to get the depth calculation wrong for them somehow.
>
> You mean git describe <commit> produces wrong results for those?

Running "describe" as an external command, like the patch you are responding to does, would not produce any wrong result, but Réne's point is that it would be very involved to turn "describe" into a function that can be called as if it is a library function without disrupting the operation of "log" that is running in the same address space, and the change he tried had some weird bugs to get the computation wrong.