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maintaining: explain how "git describe" works with lightweight tags #1145

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maintaining: explain how "git describe" works with lightweight tags #1145

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2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion book/05-distributed-git/sections/maintaining.asc
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Expand Up @@ -497,7 +497,7 @@ This way, you can export a snapshot or build and name it something understandabl
In fact, if you build Git from source code cloned from the Git repository, `git --version` gives you something that looks like this.
If you're describing a commit that you have directly tagged, it gives you simply the tag name.

The `git describe` command favors annotated tags (tags created with the `-a` or `-s` flag), so release tags should be created this way if you're using `git describe`, to ensure the commit is named properly when described.
By default, the `git describe` command requires annotated tags (tags created with the `-a` or `-s` flag); if you want to take advantage of lightweight (non-annotated) tags as well, add the `--tags` option to the command.
You can also use this string as the target of a `git checkout` or `git show` command, although it relies on the abbreviated SHA-1 value at the end, so it may not be valid forever.
For instance, the Linux kernel recently jumped from 8 to 10 characters to ensure SHA-1 object uniqueness, so older `git describe` output names were invalidated.

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