On Wed, Oct 02, 2019 at 03:10:12PM +0200, Martin Nicolay wrote: > I don't know if this is a lack of understanding or a software or > documentation bug. > > man git-fetch says about tags: > By default, any tag that points into the histories being fetched is > also fetched; the effect is to fetch tags that point at branches that > you are interested in. > > If I fetch without --tags the tags that point to the commits of the fetched > branch are not fetched. If I fetch with --tags than all tags are fetched but > I only wish to fetch tags pointing to something in the branch fetched. It's a documentation bug, I think. We won't auto-follow tags when fetching into FETCH_HEAD (but this is further confused by the fact that fetching into FETCH_HEAD will auto-update a tracking ref). So instead of this: > $ git fetch origin master try this: $ git fetch origin or even this: $ git fetch origin master:refs/remotes/origin/master There's more discussion in this thread (but it looks like no patches ever came out of it): https://public-inbox.org/git/20170817092853.hteuzni5lxia4ejf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ -Peff