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It shows you the most recent tag that is reachable from a particular commit is. Maybe this is something that "git-name-rev" should be taught to do, instead of having a separate command for it. Regardless, I find it useful. What it does is to take any random commit, and "name" it by looking up the most recent commit that is tagged and reachable from that commit. If the match is exact, it will just print out that ref-name directly. Otherwise it will print out the ref-name, followed by the 8-character "short SHA". IOW, with something like Junios current tree, I get: [torvalds@g5 git]$ git-describe parent refs/tags/v1.0.4-g2414721b ie the current head of my "parent" branch (ie Junio) is based on v1.0.4, but since it has a few commits on top of that, it has added the git hash of the thing to the end: "-g" + 8-char shorthand for the commit 2414721. Doing a "git-describe" on a tag-name will just show the full tag path: [torvalds@g5 git]$ git-describe v1.0.4 refs/tags/v1.0.4 unless there are _other_ tags pointing to that commit, in which case it will just choose one at random. This is useful for two things: - automatic version naming in Makefiles, for example. We could use it in git itself: when doing "git --version", we could use this to give a much more useful description of exactly what version was installed. - for any random commit (say, you use "gitk <pathname>" or "git-whatchanged" to look at what has changed in some file), you can figure out what the last version of the repo was. Ie, say I find a bug in commit 39ca371, I just do: [torvalds@g5 linux]$ git-describe 39ca371 refs/tags/v2.6.14-rc4-g39ca371c and I now know that it was _not_ in v2.6.14-rc4, but was presumably in v2.6.14-rc5. The latter is useful when you want to see what "version timeframe" a commit happened in. Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
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