Re: [PATCH] Make GIT-VERSION-GEN tolerate missing git describe command

[John Ellson <ellson@research.att.com>]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Dec 2005, John Ellson wrote:
>   
>> I think it is probably a bug that "git non_existent_command"
>> returns its error message to stdout without an error, where
>> "git-non_existent_command" behaves differently and does return an
>> error.
>>
>> Older versions of git did not implement "git describe"  and
>> GIT-VERSION-GEN produces an empty version string if run on
>> a system with such a git installed.  The consequence
>> is that "make rpm" fails.
>>
>> This patch fixes GIT-VERSION-GEN so that it works in the
>> absence of a working "git describe"
>>     
>
> Shouldn't you make "git.c" return an error too, so that "git-describe" and 
> "git describe" both fail properly?
>
> I realize that you'd want to do your patch _too_ (in case somebody has an 
> old version of "git" installed), but I just think it would be sensible to 
> fix the problem that causes this in the first place..
>
> Continuing to output to stdout rather than stderr is probably a good idea 
> (so that it's easy to do "git help | less" or something), but yeah, I 
> think an unrecognized command should at least return an error.
>
> 		Linus
>   

I checked and that bug has been fixed since the older version of git that
was causing me problems. "git non_existent_command" now returns 1.
However, the error message was also changed to
goto stderr, which it sounds like you disagree with?   Personally
I don't have a problem with it, although a real "git-help" command
might be a good idea too.

John