CI: git describe is not getting the tag being created in the create event

[llucax]

In #301 we migrated to GitHub Actions, and we are creating and archiving the Debian package as an artifact, but git is not getting the latest tag when doing a describe. I'm not sure if the checkout step is not fetching the latest tag for some reason or what else is going on.

Re-running the job doesn't fix anything so it doesn't seem to be a timing issue and it's very weird because it does find the previous tag, so it is also fetching tags.

[jwilk]

The checkout step is doing something weird:

/usr/bin/git -c protocol.version=2 fetch --no-tags --prune --progress --no-recurse-submodules origin +3c73ead8f28f635d1b59154462f284be536e95b5:refs/tags/v2.1.2
/usr/bin/git checkout --progress --force refs/tags/v2.1.2

If I do the above, I also get:

$ git describe
v2.1.1-8-g3c73ead

[jwilk]

I think this is actions/checkout#649 ("Signed tags incorrectly checked out").

As a work-around, you could pass --tags to git describe.

[llucax]

Oh, damn you GitHub! Thanks for looking into this. We wanted to explicitly use annotated tags to make sure describe is only done on those and not the lightweight ones. I think for now we can just live with this until it is properly fixed.

[jwilk]

I guess you could re-fetch the tags from GitHub:

$ git fetch origin --tags -f
From https://github.com/sociomantic-tsunami/git-hub
 t [tag update]      v2.1.2     -> v2.1.2
$ git describe
v2.1.2

[llucax]

Yeah, I think this is the most sensible workaround. Maybe even just fetching GITHUB_REF explicitly if only the current tag is missing.