Re: Suggestion: drop 'g' in git-describe suffix

["Santi Béjar" <sbejar@gmail.com>]

On 11/2/06, Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@xs4all.nl> wrote:
> Andy Whitcroft escreveu:
> > Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> >>
> >>   tag+sha1
> >>
> >> to separate the tag and the committish.
> >
> > Well there is a non-alphabet character in there, a minus (-).  The g
> > prefix on the sha1 _fragment_ it to indicate that it is in fact a
> > truncated sha1, not a complete one.

I think it is there to indicate it is a git commit sha1.

>
> is this policy documented somewhere?  None of the tools understand it.
>
> [lilydev@haring git]$ git describe
> v1.4.3.3-g1e1f76e
> [lilydev@haring git]$ git show g1e1f76e
> fatal: ambiguous argument 'g1e1f76e': unknown revision or path not in
> the working tree.
> Use '--' to separate paths from revisions
>

Use the complete output of describe:
$ git show v1.4.3.3-g1e1f76e

or the abbrev sha1:
$ git show 1e1f76e

> My suggestion is to use
>
>    v1.4.3.3+1e1f76e

My suggestion is to use:

v1.4.3.3-git1e1f76e

to make clear that it is a git revision version.

One problem I see with this scheme (either 'g', 'git' of '+') is that
it does not provide an increasing version number, even for
fast-forwarding commits. Then it is not useful as a package version
number (deb or rpm). I've already seen deb packages with
version+git20061010. One possibility could be to add the number of
commits between the tag and the commit as:

v1.4.3.3-git12g1e1f76e

to provide a weak ordering for fast-forwarding commits. What do you thing?