How to get the latest release tag in git and the distance to HEAD

Question

Using https://github.com/google/glog as an example. The latest release is 0.3.5.

After searching hours on stackoverflow and google, I am not able to find a correct answer.

git describe 

shows

v0.3.3-147-gb3695ee

and

git describe --tags

shows

v0.3.4-133-gb3695ee

and

git describe --tags `git rev-list --tags --max-count=1`

shows

v0.3.5

What command should I type in order to get

v0.3.5-41-gb3695ee

Answer 1

I think your command use is correct, and it's more of a repo/branch issue.

Briefly, from the describe documentation:

The command finds the most recent tag that is reachable from a commit. If the tag points to the commit, then only the tag is shown. Otherwise, it suffixes the tag name with the number of additional commits on top of the tagged object and the abbreviated object name of the most recent commit.

By default (without --all or --tags) git describe only shows annotated tags. For more information about creating annotated tags see the -a and -s options to git-tag.

So if the desired tag isn't being shown using git describe , we can assume it's either:

• Not reachable from the current commit.
• Not an annotated tag.
• Not an existing tag.

To show non-annotated tags, we can used git describe --tags . Since this seems to give us a different tag, but not the one you're after, we can probably conclude that the tag you're interested in either doesn't exist, or is not reachable from the current branch.

I cloned the repo in question and ran git tag --list which does show a selection of tags including 0.3.3 , 0.3.4 , and 0.3.5 . So it seems the tag exists, but must not be on the master branch. We can confirm this with git branch --contains <commit> , where <commit> will be 0.3.5 . If you haven't yet cloned any remote branches, this will give you no results.

We can run git branch -r --contains <commit> to check the remote branches, which gives the output origin/v035 . It looks like the tag we're after is only reachable on the remote origin/v035 branch.

If we checkout this branch locally, and run git describe --tags , we will get the output v0.3.5 , we don't see the suffix described by the docs, because the tag points at the current commit (tip of the branch).