GIT submodule fatal: cannot describe

Question

I am trying to add a git submodule to my project, but git keep telling me $ git submodule fatal: cannot describe 'dd650e8bb4762a8a7f69a6412b4765c9bb108778'

What means "fatal: cannot describe" and how can i avoid this?

Answer 1

This is certainly bug in Git (please send description of how it does occur, and the git version to git mailing list), but you can avoid this git describe error by creating annotated tag pointing somewhere to the commit before adding submodule (with git tag -s or git tag -a). For example to some released version.

Answer 2

git describe will throw an error 'cannot describe' if it cannot find an annotated tag and you do not use the --tags switch. See man git-describe and man git-tag for more info on this.