On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 10:08:21AM +0100, Uwe Kleine-König wrote: > John and I wondered about git fetch overwriting local tags. I was sure > enough to claim that git fetch won't overwrite local tags with remote > tags having the same name. But after John pointed me to > > http://www.pythian.com/news/9067/on-the-perils-of-importing-remote-tags-in-git/ > > I tested that (using Debian's 1.7.7.3) and really, git does overwrite > local tags. > > Here is my test script: > [...] > git fetch --tags ../a > [...] > Is this intended? Sort of. By default, "git fetch" will "auto-follow" tags; if you fetch a commit which is pointed to by a tag, then git will fetch that tag, too. So generally, you shouldn't need to specify "--tags" at all, because you will already be getting the relevant tags. The "--tags" option, however, is a short-hand for saying "fetch all of the tags", and is equivalent to providing the refspec: git fetch ../a refs/tags/*:refs/tags/* Which of course will update your local tags with similarly-named ones from the remote. So in that sense, there is no bug, and it is working as intended; the problem is that the author's intent was not the same as your intent. :) I'm not sure why you're using "--tags" in the first place. That might help us figure out if there's another way to do what you want that is safer. That being said, it would be nice if "--tags" wasn't so surprising. Three things that I think could help are: 1. We usually require a "+" on the refspec (or "--force") to update non-fast-forward branches. But there is no such safety on tags (which generally shouldn't be updated at all). Should we at least be enforcing the same fast-forward rules on tag fetches (or even something more strict, like forbidding tag update at all unless forced)? 2. We don't keep a reflog on tags. Generally there's no point. But it wouldn't be very expensive (since they don't usually change), and could provide a safety mechanism here. 3. Keeping tags from remotes in separate namespaces, but collating them at lookup time. This has been discussed, and I think is generally a fine idea, but nobody has moved forward with code. -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