On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 07:50:46PM +0100, Thomas Koeller wrote: > on my machine I have clones of both the linux-mips and > Linus' kernel tree. I recently found that git-describe > behaves differently in those trees: > > bash-3.2$ cd linux-2.6.git/ > bash-3.2$ git-status > # On branch master > nothing to commit (working directory clean) > bash-3.2$ git-describe bd71c182d5a02337305fc381831c11029dd17d64 > v2.6.21-2747-gbd71c18 > bash-3.2$ cd ../excite.git/ > bash-3.2$ git-status > # On branch master > nothing to commit (working directory clean) > bash-3.2$ git-describe bd71c182d5a02337305fc381831c11029dd17d64 > fatal: cannot describe 'bd71c182d5a02337305fc381831c11029dd17d64' > > The commit is of course present in both trees. AFAIK the > 'cannot describe' error shows if there are no tags at all, > but this is not the case; .git/refs/tags is fully populated. > Has anybody got a clue as to what may be wrong here? I know the issue, for example: [ralf@denk linux-mips]$ git log linux-1.3.0 | head -5 commit 908d4681a1dc3792ecafbe64265783a86c4cccb6 Author: Ralf Baechle <ralf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Sun Oct 6 07:00:00 1996 +0000 Import of Linux/MIPS 2.1.1 [ralf@denk linux-mips]$ git describe 908d4681a1dc3792ecafbe64265783a86c4cccb6 fatal: cannot describe '908d4681a1dc3792ecafbe64265783a86c4cccb6' [ralf@denk linux-mips]$ I notice it primarily with fairly old tags though not necessarily as antique as this one. Cheers, Ralf