Re: [PATCH v3 5/5] describe: teach describe negative pattern matches

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jacob Keller <jacob.e.keller@intel.com> writes:

> From: Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com>
>
> Teach git-describe the `--exclude` option which will allow specifying
> a glob pattern of tags to ignore. This can be combined with the
> `--match` patterns to enable more flexibility in determining which tags
> to consider.
>
> For example, suppose you wish to find the first official release tag
> that contains a certain commit. If we assume that official release tags
> are of the form "v*" and pre-release candidates include "*rc*" in their
> name, we can now find the first tag that introduces commit abcdef via:
>
>   git describe --contains --match="v*" --exclude="*rc*"
>
> Add documentation and tests for this change.
>
> Signed-off-by: Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com>
> ---

The above is much better than 3/5 with a concrete example (compared
to the vague "certain kinds of references").  It also does not have
the "we check this first and then that" ;-).

> diff --git a/Documentation/git-describe.txt b/Documentation/git-describe.txt
> index 7ad41e2f6ade..21a43b78924a 100644
> --- a/Documentation/git-describe.txt
> +++ b/Documentation/git-describe.txt
> @@ -88,6 +88,14 @@ OPTIONS
>  	patterns will be considered. Use `--no-match` to clear and reset the
>  	list of patterns.
>  
> +--exclude <pattern>::
> +	Do not consider tags matching the given `glob(7)` pattern, excluding
> +	the "refs/tags/" prefix. This can be used to narrow the tag space and
> +	find only tags matching some meaningful criteria. If given multiple
> +	times, a list of patterns will be accumulated and tags matching any
> +	of the patterns will be excluded. Use `--no-exclude` to clear and
> +	reset the list of patterns.
> +

Similar to 3/5, perhaps we want to say something about interaction
between this one and --match?