On Wed, Nov 04, 2015 at 12:11:27PM +0700, Robin Munn wrote: > Several people (including me) seem to expect git-describe's commit > count to be calculated differently than how it's actually calculated. > For example, see the following three Stack Overflow questions: > > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31852885/git-describe-inexplicable-commit-count > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33116182/can-i-change-how-git-describe-counts-commits > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13568372/commit-count-calculation-in-git-describe > > The scenario that all three questions is asking about is the following: > > 1) I'm working along on a branch whose most recent tag is v1.1, > created 96 commits ago. > 2) Someone else merges some work into master, and tags with v1.2. I > want to incorporate their work into my own, so I merge master into my > branch. > 3) I now have a branch that is one commit "forward" from tag v1.2. I > therefore expect git-describe to say "v1.2-1-g1234567". Instead, I get > "v1.2-97-g1234567". > > Now, git-describe is working precisely as documented here. The > documentation describes the commit count as being "the number of > commits which would be displayed by 'git log (tag commit)..(described > commit)' " and that is indeed what I'm getting. If I do "git log > v1.2..HEAD", there will be 97 log entries, because the latest commit > that is an ancestor of both v1.2 and HEAD is where my branch was > created from master 97 commits ago. > > However, this is unexpected behavior for me. I was expecting to get a > commit count of 1, not a commit count of 97. Instead of a count of all > the commits since I forked from master 97 commits ago, I was expecting > a count of all the commits since the tag that git-describe has picked > as the latest tag. In other words, instead of the count to match "git > log v1.2..HEAD", I was expecting the count to match "git log > --ancestry-path v1.2..HEAD". If your branch had been merged into v1.2, and you merged v1.2 back, then you would have a lower count. One way to look at it is that the count tells you how much your branch differs from the tag, and 97 is a more realistic indicator of the amount of difference between the tag and your branch head than 1 would be. I, for one, would be confused if the count was 1. Mike -- 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