On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 03:20:53PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote: > Using fetch-pack, I can clone a single tag from a repository: > > /tmp/testrepo$ git init > Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/testrepo/.git/ > /tmp/testrepo$ git fetch-pack /home/josh/src/linux-2.6/.git refs/tags/v2.6.12 I don't think there is any reason to use fetch-pack here instead of fetch. The latter will handle other non-git protocols like dumb http and git-over-http. > However, I can't seem to find any way to convince git clone to do the > same thing for me. git clone will clone a branch, but not a tag. > > /tmp/testrepo$ git clone /home/josh/src/linux-2.6/.git -b refs/tags/v2.6.12 > Cloning into linux-2.6... > done. > warning: Remote branch refs/tags/v2.6.12 not found in upstream origin, using HEAD instead Right. There is no way to do what you want with clone. The "-b" option is not "just clone this one thing", it is "clone everything, but the branch I am interested in is ...". The fetch refspec remains "+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*". To clone a subset of a repository, you have to do the init+fetch trick, as you did above. If you want the configuration set up by clone, you can do that, too, with "git config". So the equivalent commands to the clone you want are: git init linux-2.6 cd linux-2.6 git config remote.origin.url /home/josh/src/linux-2.6 git config remote.origin.fetch refs/tags/v2.6.12 git fetch origin We could make clone more flexible with respect to such things, but I don't know how useful that would be. A very small minority of power users want to use weird fetch refspecs, and it is simple enough to configure them manually, as above. > On a different note, git fetch-pack seems to silently fail if asked to > fetch a remote tag which points at a tree object rather than a commit > object: > > /tmp/testrepo$ git init > Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/testrepo/.git/ > /tmp/testrepo$ git fetch-pack /home/josh/src/linux-2.6/.git refs/tags/v2.6.12-tree > (1) /tmp/testrepo$ echo $? > 1 Did you mean v2.6.11-tree? There is no v2.6.12-tree in standard linux-2.6 repositories. So fetch-pack is failing because there are no matching refs to fetch. This works for me: $ git init $ git fetch-pack /home/peff/compile/linux-2.6 refs/tags/v2.6.11-tree remote: Counting objects... ... If you want better error messages, use the fetch porcelain: $ git init $ git fetch /home/peff/compile/linux-2.6 refs/tags/v2.6.12-tree fatal: Couldn't find remote ref refs/tags/v2.6.12-tree fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly -Peff -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html