Re: describe fails on tagless branch

Jakub Narebski [off-list ref] writes:

Andy Parkins wrote:

quoted

quoted

It might not be a bad idea to give '-q' option to make it silent
when it fails because the commit is indescribable.

I don't think it's worth it.  The "-q" be used only in scripts, and in a 
script you would do the whole "2> /dev/null || echo 'No tag found'" thing 
anyway.

It would be worth for Perl (for gitweb) to be able to use list form of magic
open, without spawning shell (and assorted argument quoting troubles), but
silently. 

I think it would be fairly easy to add -q option to git wrapper: it would
simply set die, error and warn routines and no-op (no-write) versions.

You completely missed my point.  describe -q would not squelch
*all* errors and die()'s, but only the specific "this cannot be
described".  If you give a non-existent object name on the
command line, it _should_ barf loudly.