git-describe tells you the version number you're at, or errors out, e.g.
when you run it outside of a repository, which may happen when downloading
a tar ball instead of using git to obtain the source code.
To keep this property of only erroring out, when not in a repository,
severe (submodule) errors must be downgraded to reporting them gently
instead of having git-describe error out completely.
To achieve that a flag '--broken' is introduced, which is in the same
vein as '--dirty' but uses an actual child process to check for dirtiness.
When that child dies unexpectedly, we'll append '-broken' instead of
'-dirty'.
Signed-off-by: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>