"Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@xxxxxxx> writes:
> What would be the best way of updating the documentation to clarify the
> point? Given ch3cooli's previous surprise.
Oh, thanks for bringing it up. I was about to start another message
that begins with "Having said all that..." ;-)
I think the entire paragraph should be rewritten. The first long
sentence explains that you will get tags that point at the branches
and other stuff you follow by default, so there is no need to
explicitly ask for tags most of the time. While that is true, it is
secondary in describing what "--tags" is about. It is to grab all
tags and store them locally, and that needs to come at the very
beginning.
And that auto-following behaviour is already described in the
previous entry for -n/--no-tags. So how about something like this:
This is a short-hand for giving "refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*"
refspec from the command line, to ask all tags to be fetched
and stored locally.
Note that it is deliberate that the above does not mention tagopt
configuration at all. The variable was primarily meant to be used
with --no-tags, so that with this:
[remote "origin"] tagopt = --no-tags
you can "git fetch origin" to keep up with the development on
branches without having to fetch tags from there. Fetching tags and
only tags from a remote is almost always not what you want; in other
words, remote."origin".tagopt set to --tags is a misconfiguration
99% of the time, unless you are only interested in following tagged
release points.
--
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