On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 8:36 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Francis Moreau <francis.moro@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> Inside the kernel repository, I tried this: >> >> $ git describe --dirty --match 'v[0-9]*' --abbrev=4 HEAD >> fatal: --dirty is incompatible with committishes >> >> If 'HEAD' is removed then git-describe works as expected. >> >> Is that expected ? > > I would say so, at least in modern codebase. > > "git describe" without any commit object name used to mean "describe > the HEAD commit using the better known points" before the --dirty > option was introduced. > > But "--dirty" makes it describe the current checkout. For example, > output from "git describe --dirty" v1.8.0-211-gd8b4531-dirty means > "your working tree contains work-in-progress based on d8b4531, which > is 211 commits ahead of the v1.8.0 tag". So conceptually, it should > not take any commit, even if it were spelled HEAD. > > "git describe --dirty HEAD^^" would be an utter nonsense for the > same reason. Thanks for explaining, that makes sense. -- Francis -- 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