This is my proposed fix for the "local tag killer" problem that I reported recently [1]. There are three main things changed by this patch series: 1. "git fetch --tags" causes tags to be fetched *in addition to* any other refspecs that are configured for the remote, rather than *instead of*. I believe this is more useful behavior. It is also consistent with the documentation as it was written before it was disambiguated in 1.8.0.3. 2. "git fetch --prune" only prunes references that match an explicit refspec (either from the command line or from the remote.<name>.fetch configuration. In particular, using "--prune" and "--tag" together do *not* make tags subject to pruning. (Tags can still be pruned if the user specifies an explicit refspec "refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*".) 3. Previously, if the user invoked one of the following commands with --no-prune, the --no-prune option was not passed to the "git fetch" subprocesses that they invoked to do their work: git fetch --all git fetch --multiple git fetch --recurse-submodules git remote update If fetch.prune or remote.<name>.prune were set to true, this could result in unwanted reference pruning. The last commit in the series fixes this bug and should not be controversial. I had originally planned to solve the "local tag killer" problem by adding a new configuration option to define which reference namespaces were subject to pruning (e.g., remote.<name>.pruneRef="refs/remotes/*"). I may yet submit that patch series as a separate feature. But while working on it I hit on the present solution, which I think is simpler and more elegant (albeit a bit less flexible). Changes (1) and (2) introduce behavior changes, but I think that they are improvements and that the resulting backwards-incompatibility is acceptable: Change (1) means that "git fetch --tags <remote>" without any additional refspec arguments will fetch more references than it did before. But I don't think it is very useful to want to fetch tags without fetching other configured references, so I think it is OK [2]. Change (2) means that using "git fetch --tags --prune" will *not* prune tags. (This is the whole point of the change!) As discussed in the mailing list, it is usually bad policy to prune tags, because tags for the local repository and for all remote repositories currently share a single namespace, "refs/tags/*". Therefore, pruning tags based on information from a single remote risks pruning local tags or tags that have been obtained from another remote. The main exception, when one probably *does* want to prune tags, is when fetching into a mirror clone. But mirror clones have "remote.<name>.fetch=+refs/*:refs/*", and so even after this change tags will be subject to pruning when fetching into a mirror clone. The only other place I can find that does reference pruning is "git remote prune", but that codepath didn't respect remote.<name>.tagopt anyway and therefore it *didn't* prune tags unless they were part of an explicit refspec; i.e., this codepath already behaved the "new" way that other pruning codepaths now behave. Patches 1-9 are just preliminary cleanup and documentation improvements. Patch 10 implements change (1) described above. Patch 11 implements change (2). Patches 12-14 are some more minor cleanups. Patch 15 implements change (3). [1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/234723 [2] Indeed, I bet that most scripts that invoke "git fetch --tags <remote>" also invoke a plain "git fetch" immediately before or after to get the rest of the references. Michael Haggerty (15): t5510: use the correct tag name in test t5510: prepare test refs more straightforwardly t5510: check that "git fetch --prune --tags" does not prune branches api-remote.txt: correct section "struct refspect" get_ref_map(): rename local variables ref_remove_duplicates(): avoid redundant bisection ref_remove_duplicates(): simplify function ref_remove_duplicates(): improve documentation comment builtin/fetch.c: reorder function definitions fetch --tags: fetch tags *in addition to* other stuff fetch --prune: prune only based on explicit refspecs query_refspecs(): move some constants out of the loop builtin/remote.c: reorder function definitions builtin/remote.c:update(): use struct argv_array fetch, remote: properly convey --no-prune options to subprocesses Documentation/config.txt | 2 +- Documentation/fetch-options.txt | 21 ++- Documentation/technical/api-remote.txt | 20 +-- builtin/fetch.c | 253 +++++++++++++++---------------- builtin/remote.c | 196 ++++++++++++------------ git-pull.sh | 2 +- remote.c | 44 +++--- remote.h | 9 +- t/t5510-fetch.sh | 36 ++++- t/t5515/fetch.br-unconfig_--tags_.._.git | 1 + t/t5515/fetch.master_--tags_.._.git | 1 + t/t5525-fetch-tagopt.sh | 23 ++- 12 files changed, 322 insertions(+), 286 deletions(-) -- 1.8.4 -- 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