git submodule status not describing modules

Hi,

in git 1.5.4.4, the git submodules manpage says that the status subcommand should:

Show the status of the submodules. This will print the SHA-1 of the currently checked out commit for each submodule, along with the submodule path and the output of git-describe(1) for the SHA-1.

However, I cannot get the git-describe output. If I remember properly, in previous versions of git, this was shown correctly.

Sergio
 

Nor I see any "+" sign when the checked out submodule differs from the submodule recorded in the index of the super module.

... and it is because I have no url defined for the submodules. Is there any particular reason for testing the url in cmd_status as in

if test -z "$url" || ! test -d "$path"/.git
                then
                        say "-$sha1 $path"
                        continue;
                fi

nothing in the following seems to depend on it.