Question

My version number looks like 0.1.3 and has two components:

• 0.1 (the tag)
• 3 (commits after tag)

All this information easy to obtain from git describe --tags.

For version 0.1.3 git describe may look like

0.1-3-g53d4dec

All of this works fine, but I’m looking for the number of commits affecting only a given subtree, not the whole repo. I don’t want to change the version number if something within examples/ or test/ changed, but I do if something within src/ changed.

Basically, I’m looking for git describe --relative src/ that works along the same lines as git log --relative.

Answer 1

If you are scripting Git, you should really use the “plumbing” commands instead of the “porcelain” commands (see git(1). In this case, the most likely candidate seems like git rev-list.

git rev-list --full-history v0.1.. -- src | wc -l