builtin/describe: introduce --broken flag
git-describe tells you the version number you're at, or errors out, e.g.
when you run it outside of a repository, which may happen when downloading
a tar ball instead of using git to obtain the source code.
To keep this property of only erroring out, when not in a repository,
severe (submodule) errors must be downgraded to reporting them gently
instead of having git-describe error out completely.
To achieve that a flag '--broken' is introduced, which is in the same
vein as '--dirty' but uses an actual child process to check for dirtiness.
When that child dies unexpectedly, we'll append '-broken' instead of
'-dirty'.
Signed-off-by: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
diff --git a/Documentation/git-describe.txt b/Documentation/git-describe.txt
index 8755f3a..26f19d3 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-describe.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-describe.txt
@@ -30,9 +30,14 @@
Commit-ish object names to describe. Defaults to HEAD if omitted.
--dirty[=<mark>]::
- Describe the working tree.
- It means describe HEAD and appends <mark> (`-dirty` by
- default) if the working tree is dirty.
+--broken[=<mark>]::
+ Describe the state of the working tree. When the working
+ tree matches HEAD, the output is the same as "git describe
+ HEAD". If the working tree has local modification "-dirty"
+ is appended to it. If a repository is corrupt and Git
+ cannot determine if there is local modification, Git will
+ error out, unless `--broken' is given, which appends
+ the suffix "-broken" instead.
--all::
Instead of using only the annotated tags, use any ref
