Re: [updated PATCH] Protect current tags, import tags into remote tree

Junio C Hamano wrote:

There is in git-svn.

Due to the quirks of CVS (and SVN), over time many CVS/SVN repositories have picked up a lot of tags which either made sense at the time (but don't anymore), or have not been wiped because of the difficulty/impossibility to do so in the old repository.

The usual way to import from CVS is to do the import, then pick the branches and tags you really want to keep, copy/replicate them outside remotes and then move on in a clean fashion.

Rerunning cvsimport on a regular basis causes the import to (re)create all the tags from CVS again; if this is done in your regular tags space, this is a mess at best, or overwrites whatever renamed tags you carefully created which happen to match with old CVS tagnames.

git-svn *does* use the tags namespace under remotes, so it does it the
'proper' way.
With respect to the concern that all git porcelain works without a
separate remotes/.../tags namespace, two things:
- git-svn and git-cvsimport cross the boundary to a different VCS and
  therefore can/should use an extra barrier before (auto)converting to
  git native tags (and branches).
- I personally would find it most natural when upon cloning a git
  repository not only the branches cloned end up in a separate remotes
  namespace (like they do now already), but that the tags would do the same
  (e.g. in remotes/.../tags).

Even if this behaviour is not deemed "good" to be a new default, I'd strongly suggest to at least make it optional using an appropriate flag (and respective git-config variable to make it the local default).