Why is `git describe -dirty` adding a `-dirty` suffix when describing a clean checkout?

Question

I have just discovered the --dirty option to git describe and it looks like it should do something very useful, i.e. append a suffix to the output of <

Answer 1

Beware that there was another bug fix regarding git describe --dirty, about a year ago: https://github.com/git/git/commit/a1e19004e11dcbc0ceebd92c425ceb1770e52d0b

"git --work-tree=$there --git-dir=$here describe --dirty" did not work correctly as it did not pay attention to the location of the worktree specified by the user

In case of this bug, the workarounds shown here didn't work, so we had to upgrade our installation. There seems to be no fix readily available for Debian buster as of today (2020-02-20), yet the Debian bullseye main git packages are compatible with buster right now.