On Thu, Oct 13, 2022 at 5:31 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> It indeed is confusing and might warrant some clarification, if not
> updating.
>
> * "--tags" is equivalent to giving "refs/tags*:refs/tags*", so it
> might be natural to expect that you can say the same thing as
> above with "fetch $URL --tags --no-tags", but it does not work
> that way. Command line parser treats "--tags" and "--no-tags" as
> if they follow the "last one wins" semantics.
>
> * As discussed in this thread, what "--no-tags" really means is "do
> not follow tags"; there is no way to countermand a "--no-tags"
> earlier on the command line to say "earlier we said do not
> follow, but we changed our mind. Please do follow tags".
Thank you for the clarification.
What follows is a small write-up of my problem for posterity and
in-case someone else finds it useful.
What I'm trying to achieve is by default excluding a set of tags auto
generated build tags from being fetched, unless I specifically fetch
them.
Something akin to this works
[remote "origin"]
url = git@xxxxxxxxxx:git/git.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
fetch = ^refs/tags/v2.9.*
tagOpt = --no-tags
This lets me
git fetch
git fetch origin master
without fetching tags matching the negative refspec, as expected. As
well as override it through
git fetch origin '+refs/tags/v2.9.0*:refs/tags/v2.9.0*'
which isn't super friendly to write but does the job
Earlier in the thread, I was under the impression --tags worked better
than --no-tags. It seemed it would avoid clobbering tags. I don't
think that's actually the case (they both clobber?) and it turned out
it wouldn't exclude refs if I was fetching a specific ref, ie
git fetch origin master
would also fetch the tags I didn't want. So --no-tags it is
