On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 12:32:51PM -0700, Bryan Turner wrote: > > $ git ls-remote -n1 --tags --sort=v:refname origin "v*" > [...] > With the v2 wire protocol, the client could provide a prefix (like > `refs/tags/`, or potentially `refs/tags/v`) to reduce what the server > included in the ref advertisement, but even the v2 protocol doesn't > have anything for telling the server "Version parse these names and > then return the first N". That means the parsing, sorting and trimming > for the advertised tags would still all have to happen locally. (I'm > sure someone can correct me if I've misstated what protocol v2 can do > for filtering, but I don't see any "ls-refs" options that look like > they enable anything other than prefix matching.) No, that sounds right. The "--tags" in the original command should cause v2 to ask only for refs/tags/. But because of the way ls-remote matching works, "v*" is not a pure prefix match, and would find "refs/tags/foo/v1.2.3". So we can't use protocol-level matching to ask for "refs/tags/v*". There are no provisions in the protocol for sorting, nor for limiting the output. I didn't check, but I suspect some hosting-platform APIs might be able to answer this with a single query. -Peff
