Re: Add a "git-describe" command

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
> I wonder if some tags are more important than others (we may
> want to pick a signed tag that is a bit further down than an
> autogenerated snapshot -git47 tag), but that depends on the
> usage.  For bug hunting -git47 is more useful than sparsely done
> signed tags e.g. -rc4.

I considered just printing every tag I could reach, and then you could do 

	git-describe xyz | head -1

to get the closest one.

But then I decided that almost always, you just want the most recent one. 
But we could add a "--history" cmd line option to show all the reachable 
ones (or limit it to <n> tags shown or something)..

But there's already some logic to cull out uninteresting references (ie 
the "--all" flag enables all kinds of references, normally we only look at 
tags), and yes, we could also just add some other culling logic. For 
example, maybe we only care about annotated tags (ie real tag objects with 
a message, rather than just direct references to commits).

My real goal was to see a real meaningful version when I do "git 
--version". I just hate how it normally just says it's version "1.0.GIT", 
and I have no idea how new/old it really is.

			Linus