Question

$ git tag hello

$ git describe --tags
hello

... work work ...
$ git commit -m "work stuff"

$ git describe --tags
hello-1-48281

Say what? What’s the extra stuff? Doesn’t look like a SHA1… is it possible to just get “hello” back?

Answer 1

Say what? What’s the extra stuff? Doesn’t look like a SHA1… is it possible to just get “hello” back?

“git describe” probably doesn’t do what you think it does:

DESCRIPTION
  The command finds the most recent tag that is reachable from a commit.
  If the tag points to the commit, then only the tag is shown. Otherwise,
  it suffixes the tag name with the number of additional commits on top
  of the tagged object and the abbreviated object name of the most recent
  commit.

So, in your example of “hello-1-48281”, git is saying, “the hello tag is separated by 1 commit from the current object, which is 48281.”

If you want a list of tags instead, just do git tag -l.