Git tags - support for multiple versions on same commit

I think that the current mechanism for getting tags (improved in #77) doesn’t pick the biggest version if you tag the same commit multiple times for the same application but for different versions.

Basically when I bump a version number for my application without doing a commit (not that common but does happen if we update a package’s dependencies) the older tag is getting picked up.

Probably easiest to illustrate just using git and the current “git describe” command:

# git init .
Initialised empty Git repository in /tmp/x/.git/
# touch x && git add x && git commit -m "test"
[master (root-commit) 217feb2] test
 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 x
# git tag R_example_1.0.0
# git tag R_example_1.0.1
# git describe --tags --dirty --always --long --match "R_example*"
R_example_1.0.0-0-g217feb2

Here 1.0.0 is getting taken over 1.0.1, clearly I’d like to have 1.0.1 taken over it.

From initial googling there seems to be a way to get the current tags for a commit. I suppose you could take these all in, parse them and pick the biggest? But I guess this doesn’t give you the nice things that describe does (like dirty and commits ahead).

[SvenRtbg]

Tagging with annotated tags not only adds the timestamp and committer account to this tag (and a message that probably nobody cares about), but also allows Git to pick the more recent tag, i.e. the one added later in time, when running git describe.

[jeichel-miovision]

For my purposes I added a block of code after pieces["closest-tag"] = ... to get the most recent tag

...
        pieces["closest-tag"] = full_tag[len(tag_prefix) :]

        # try to find most recent from multiple tags
        points_at_out, rc = run_command(
            GITS, ["tag", "--sort", "committerdate", "--points-at", "%s%s" % (tag_prefix, pieces["closest-tag"])],
            cwd=root
        )
        # --points-at was added in git-2.4.0
        if points_at_out is not None:
            points_at_out = points_at_out.strip().split('\n')
            for version in points_at_out:
                if version.startswith(tag_prefix):
                    pieces["closest-tag"] = version[len(tag_prefix) :]

        # distance: number of commits since tag
        pieces["distance"] = int(mo.group(2))
...