Re: git problem

[Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 07:50:46PM +0100, Thomas Koeller wrote:

> on my machine I have clones of both the linux-mips and
> Linus' kernel tree. I recently found that git-describe
> behaves differently in those trees:
> 
> bash-3.2$ cd linux-2.6.git/
> bash-3.2$ git-status
> # On branch master
> nothing to commit (working directory clean)
> bash-3.2$ git-describe bd71c182d5a02337305fc381831c11029dd17d64
> v2.6.21-2747-gbd71c18
> bash-3.2$ cd ../excite.git/
> bash-3.2$ git-status
> # On branch master
> nothing to commit (working directory clean)
> bash-3.2$ git-describe bd71c182d5a02337305fc381831c11029dd17d64
> fatal: cannot describe 'bd71c182d5a02337305fc381831c11029dd17d64'
> 
> The commit is of course present in both trees. AFAIK the
> 'cannot describe' error shows if there are no tags at all,
> but this is not the case; .git/refs/tags is fully populated.
> Has anybody got a clue as to what may be wrong here?

I know the issue, for example:

[ralf@denk linux-mips]$ git log linux-1.3.0 | head -5
commit 908d4681a1dc3792ecafbe64265783a86c4cccb6
Author: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
Date:   Sun Oct 6 07:00:00 1996 +0000

    Import of Linux/MIPS 2.1.1
[ralf@denk linux-mips]$ git describe 908d4681a1dc3792ecafbe64265783a86c4cccb6
fatal: cannot describe '908d4681a1dc3792ecafbe64265783a86c4cccb6'
[ralf@denk linux-mips]$ 

I notice it primarily with fairly old tags though not necessarily as
antique as this one.

Cheers,

  Ralf