Re: [PATCH v2] builtin/describe: introduce --broken flag

Stefan Beller [off-list ref] writes:

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 <redacted>
---
 Documentation/git-describe.txt | 11 +++++++---
 builtin/describe.c             | 47 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------
 t/t6120-describe.sh            | 20 ++++++++++++++++++
 3 files changed, 66 insertions(+), 12 deletions(-)

I admit that my suggestion to use pushv() was done without trying it
out myself, but I do agree that the result looks better, especially
because the "dirty" (not "broken") side does not even have to use a
separate argv_array to prepare the command line in the first place
(which I failed to spot exactly because I didn't try it myself ;-).

We probably _could_ use cp.argv to point at the diff_index_args()
without doing pushv(&cp.args), and that would save a bit of
allocation, but it would not matter in practice as this is not a
performance critical codepath.

Thanks.