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

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

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