[yocto] Git tool/command problems with YOCTO Open Source repos

[Beth Flanagan]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 9:18 AM Zoran Stojsavljevic
<zoran.stojsavljevic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello YOCTO people,
>
> I would like to use standard git tool while using all the Yocto
> layers. NOT only Poky repository (which, I believe, works all the way
> with git tools), but as much as possible with other github proprietary
> repos and layers. Since I am not able to execute git commands using
> some number of proprietary repos over github.
>
> As example, I'll use meta-bbb repository.
> https://github.com/jumpnow/meta-bbb.git, after cloning the following
> happens (chosen, since it has at least dozen of branches):
>
> After cloning, I did not get anything from the following commands,
> being in the root of the meta-bbb repo, namely:
>
> [user at fedora28-ssd meta-bbb]$ pwd
> /home/user/projects2/beaglebone-black/yocto-master/meta-bbb
> [user at fedora28-ssd meta-bbb]$ git describe
> fatal: No names found, cannot describe anything.
> [user at fedora28-ssd meta-bbb]$ git tag
> [user at fedora28-ssd meta-bbb]$ git checkout thud
> Branch 'thud' set up to track remote branch 'thud' from 'origin'.
> Switched to a new branch 'thud'
> [user at fedora28-ssd meta-bbb]$ git checkout sumo
> Switched to branch 'sumo'
> Your branch is up to date with 'origin/sumo'.
> [user at fedora28-ssd meta-bbb]$ git describe
> fatal: No names found, cannot describe anything.
> [user at fedora28-ssd meta-bbb]$
>
> The rationale behind this request: git is the powerful tool which
> should work and be solely used for YOCTO layers' synchronization. In
> other words, YOCTO should give some tools' (namely git) unification
> guidelines in some way. :-)
>

Zoran,

This is normal behaviour for git repositories with no tags. Git
describe just describes the latest annotated tag and if there is none,
then it of course, can't describe anything. Generally, this is up to
the repo maintainer to define tagging policy (I think all we do in
OE/YP is ask for named release branches).  So this isn't something
that is "broken" it's just not asked of layer maintainers. I'm not
sure why you need git describe in your workflow, but you could easily
write something that reverts to something like `git shortlog -1` or
something on repos that return fatal on a git describe.

I'm not sure what the request is here. To ask all the repository
maintainers to add tags so you don't return a fatal on git describe?

-b