“git describe” ignores a tag

Question

In the following lines:

$ git tag -n1
v1.8        Tagged the day before yesterday
v1.9        Tagged yesterday
v2.0        Tagged today
$ git describe
v1.9-5         


        

Answer 1

Most likely from your example, v1.9 is a tag from merge commit.

It is expected git behavior by default and you can read more about it here: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/commit/?id=80dbae03

To ignore merge tags when looking for most recent on the current branch you can use --first-parent option.

git describe --tags --first-parent --abbrev=0

--first-parent

Follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This is useful when you wish to not match tags on branches merged in the history of the target commit.

Ref: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-describe