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>

1 files changed, 20 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/t/t6120-describe.sh b/t/t6120-describe.sh
index 167491fd5b..16952e44fc 100755
--- a/t/t6120-describe.sh
+++ b/t/t6120-describe.sh
@@ -233,4 +233,24 @@ test_expect_success 'describe --contains and --no-match' '
 	test_cmp expect actual
 '
 
+test_expect_success 'setup and absorb a submodule' '
+	test_create_repo sub1 &&
+	test_commit -C sub1 initial &&
+	git submodule add ./sub1 &&
+	git submodule absorbgitdirs &&
+	git commit -a -m "add submodule" &&
+	git describe --dirty >expect &&
+	git describe --broken >out &&
+	test_cmp expect out
+'
+
+test_expect_success 'describe chokes on severly broken submodules' '
+	mv .git/modules/sub1/ .git/modules/sub_moved &&
+	test_must_fail git describe --dirty
+'
+test_expect_success 'describe ignoring a borken submodule' '
+	git describe --broken >out &&
+	grep broken out
+'
+
 test_done