To follow up on myself, this is the output of 'git describe --debug --tags' and 'git log --oneline --decor --parents' for each of the two repos. The one irritating thing is that in two of them the inital commit is not the bottommost in the log output. To make my expectation more concrete: I would expect 'git describe' to output the tag where the number of commits that are in HEAD but not in the tag is the lowest, and that would (always) be the bl-1 here. === /tmp/tmp-ws-20150116-11061-169bt1w searching to describe HEAD lightweight 3 r2.4/bl-1 lightweight 4 r2.4/bl-0 traversed 5 commits r2.4/bl-1-3-gd760b4b d760b4b 6e15dfc d905814 (HEAD, origin/r2.4/feature-2, r2.4/feature-2) Merge branch 'r2.4/master' into r2.4/feature-2 6e15dfc ad4e371 feature: 1st part d905814 86f7fcf (origin/r2.4/master, origin/HEAD, r2.4/master) main: 3rd commit 86f7fcf ad4e371 (tag: r2.4/bl-1) main: 2nd commit ad4e371 (tag: r2.4/bl-0, origin/sidestep) module: initial === /tmp/tmp-ws-20150116-11355-v7zfcc searching to describe HEAD lightweight 4 r2.4/bl-0 lightweight 4 r2.4/bl-1 traversed 5 commits r2.4/bl-0-4-g689e350 689e350 93d9eb5 d768596 (HEAD, origin/r2.4/feature-2, r2.4/feature-2) Merge branch 'r2.4/master' into r2.4/feature-2 93d9eb5 e17d86b feature: 1st part d768596 6e35c9c (origin/r2.4/master, origin/HEAD, r2.4/master) main: 3rd commit e17d86b (tag: r2.4/bl-0, origin/sidestep) module: initial 6e35c9c e17d86b (tag: r2.4/bl-1) main: 2nd commit Andreas -- "Totally trivial. Famous last words." From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@*.org> Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:29:21 -0800 -- 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