Git history for master, and release tags have diverged #3428

The git history for the release tags since v0.8.3 and master have diverged. (The release tags have rebased commits from master.)

This breaks some git functions. One that is important to me is git describe. This currently returns v0.8.2-933-g93a7861 but it should be v0.8.6-???-g93a7861. Working out how many commit there have been since the last release is really difficult with the way the release commits are being rebased.

This is on purpose. There are two branches,

• 0.8.x: stable maintenance releases, this is currently 0.8.6
• 0.9.x: unstable work on next major version, this is master

Important patches get back-ported to the 0.8.x branch.

git describe on master should ideally show 0.8.99, to make it clear that this is to be 0.9 but 0.9 is not actually released yet, like: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/clientversion.h#L12

Currently it returns 0.8.2 because 0.9 got forked from 0.8.2, but yeah this is not very informative.

And as the current master and 0.8.x branches split at 0.8.2, that is indeed what git describe shows. I agree showing 0.8.99 would be better, but would require creating a dummy tag that doesn't actually correspond to a release.

I'm not 100% sure how git tags work and thus whether it's possible (without rewriting history), but it may make sense to create a v0.8.99 tag in retrospect, at the first commit where it forked from the 0.8.x series.

Ok, Thanks for the explanation.

Indeed, tags can be applied in retrospect.

$ git tag -a v0.8.99 8c8132be73b680d04b9f6dff9dee0ae277c1bebb 
$ git describe
0.8.99-932-g93a7861