How to get a directory filled with v2.6.11?

From: Marc Singer <elf@buici.com>
Date: Jul 12, 2005, 05:03 UTC
Message-ID: <20050712050347.GA10751@buici.com>

I switched to using the git version in source control. Checkout/branching works great. :-)

But, this version of git doesn't let me do

  # git checkout -f v2.6.11
  error: Object 5dc01c595e6c6ec9ccda4f6f69c131c0dd945f8c is a tree, not a commit
  Needed a single revision

which I suspect is protection added to prevent my special sort of shenanigans. If I cannot perform the checkout anymore, is there another way to fill a directory with the contents of that particular tree?

What am I doing? I've got some updates against 2.6.11 orphaned in another develpment directory. I could just upack a tar.bz2 file for 2.6.11, but git is more clever. I want to perform a diff against the tagged v2.6.11 and my development tree.