threads / discuss / 39643

git-describe manual page's one sentence summary is misleading

Subject: git-describe manual page's one sentence summary is misleading

## tl;dr

3 messages between Jun 16, 2015 and Jun 16, 2015.

replies: 2people: 3as markdown or json

Albert Netymk· Jun 16, 2015, 10:45 UTC · lore

According to the man of git-describe, http://git-scm.com/docs/git-describe

git-describe - Show the most recent tag that is reachable from a commit

It means that this command shows the name of the most recent tag.

However, actually, it construct a new tag name if the current commit is not tagged.

I think, "git-describe - Describe a commit using the most recent tag reachable from it" is a better summary.

-- 
Best Regards

Yours faithfully
Albert Netymk

Matthieu Moy· Jun 16, 2015, 13:16 UTC · re: Albert Netymk · lore

[PATCH] Documentation/describe: improve one-line summary

git describe does not show 'the most recent tag that is reachable from a commit', but a descriptive name based on this tag. Fix the description to reflect that.

Suggested-by: Albert Netymk <albertnetymk@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@imag.fr>
---

Show 11 quoted lines

> According to the man of git-describe, http://git-scm.com/docs/git-describe
> 
> git-describe - Show the most recent tag that is reachable from a commit
> 
> It means that this command shows the name of the most recent tag.
> 
> However, actually, it construct a new tag name if the current commit
> is not tagged.
> 
> I think, "git-describe - Describe a commit using the most recent tag
> reachable from it" is a better summary.

Indeed. Here's a patch fixing this.

 Documentation/git-describe.txt | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/git-describe.txt b/Documentation/git-describe.txt
index d20ca40..e045fc7 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-describe.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-describe.txt
@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ git-describe(1)
 
 NAME
 ----
-git-describe - Show the most recent tag that is reachable from a commit
+git-describe - Describe a commit using the most recent tag reachable from it
 
 
 SYNOPSIS

-- 
2.4.1.171.g060e6ae.dirty

Junio C Hamano· Jun 16, 2015, 20:21 UTC · re: Matthieu Moy · lore

Re: [PATCH] Documentation/describe: improve one-line summary

Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@imag.fr> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> diff --git a/Documentation/git-describe.txt b/Documentation/git-describe.txt
> index d20ca40..e045fc7 100644
> --- a/Documentation/git-describe.txt
> +++ b/Documentation/git-describe.txt
> @@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ git-describe(1)
>  
>  NAME
>  ----
> -git-describe - Show the most recent tag that is reachable from a commit
> +git-describe - Describe a commit using the most recent tag reachable from it

While it feels a bit funny to describe a "describe" command as "that which describes", this definitely is an improvement.

Thanks, will queue.