Thanks for the response. Since my last message, I have been able to get a tag on the v1.0 branch (although not the original v1.0-stable tag) to appear in the git describe output when run on v1.1 head, and thus I do think a --first-parent option would be useful. On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 2:52 AM, Michael J Gruber <git@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Joshua Shrader venit, vidit, dixit 21.09.2010 21:57: >> I think I need to apologize to the list. I did not actually observe >> what I had stated in my original post. Given the description (and my >> possibly naive understanding) of git-describe, I hypothesized that >> what I originally stated was possible. If git-describe is in fact >> implemented with a first-parent-like behavior, as some people believe >> to be true, then I believe it is working correctly - I've seen nothing >> to the contrary. However, I do believe that the documentation is >> unclear if this is the case. My interpretation of "depth," which I >> believe to be consistent with the graph-theoretical definition, does >> imply that what I stated could happen. > > Josh, no need to apologize. You simply tried to understand "git > describe". The mere fact that a Git long time contributor (J6t) and an > occasional contributor (I) are discussing "git describe"'s behaviour > tells you that it can't be that easy ;) > > The man page says "most recent tag", and that is true, but with a > definition of "most recent" that you wouldn't expect. The description > there under "Search Strategy" is wrong, and has been at least since > 80dbae03. I'll try to come up with a better explanation fit for the man > page, possibly after writing some more tests. > > The intended behaviour is explained really well in Shawn's commit > message for 80dbae03. And if you look at the algorithm you see that the > order of the parents (as stored in a merge commit), in particular > first-parent relationship plays no role at all. The algo takes all > parents and inserts them in date order into a list to be looped over > afterwards. > > The more I understand the algo the more I realize that --first-parent is > useful and completely different, and that I can optimize more in my patch. > > Cheers > Michael > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html