found drama

Ever feeling lost in a sea of not-exactly-ordered tags when you enter git tag at the command prompt? It seems that a common tagging idiom in a lot of git repos is to tag important milestones or releases. Some repos use <major>.<minor>, others <major>.<minor>.<version>, still others <major>.<minor>.<version>.<patch> (and so on?). And as those repos get along, so do their version numbers. And before long, they don’t all fit on the screen; and if the updates are frequent enough, you might find that you missed that latest tag because 1.0.1.21 was “off the screen” and what you thought was the latest (1.0.1.9) was already long out-of-date. But a little Ruby magic can make this all better:

	#!/usr/bin/env ruby
	args = $*.to_a
	if args.index("-c")
	ct = [args[args.index("-c") + 1].to_i, 1].max
	end
	tags = $stdin.to_a
	tags.collect! {|v| v = v.split('.')
	v.collect! {|i| i.to_i}
	}
	tags.sort! {|a, b| a <=> b }
	if ct
	ct = [ct, tags.length].min
	tag_range = tags[-ct..-1]
	puts "LAST #{ct} VERSIONS:"
	tag_range.each {|i| puts "#{i.join('.')}" }
	else
	puts "LATEST VERSION: #{tags[-1].join('.')}"
	end

view raw get_latest_version.rb hosted with by GitHub

And then (after optionally adjusting the Ruby script as meets your needs) add the following alias to your .gitconfig:

	# add the following under `[alias]`
	latest-tag = "!sh -c 'git tag | get_latest_version.rb' -"
	recent-tags = "!sh -c 'git tag | get_latest_version.rb -c ${1}' -"

view raw .gitconfig hosted with by GitHub

…and you should be good to go. No more mysteries. (It even gracefully handles tag suffixes like -beta.)

About Rob Friesel