From: Konstantin Khomoutov <flatworm@users.sourceforge.net>
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:06:28 GMT
Subject: Re: Why git tags are there in git?
Message-ID: <20110128190628.f507599e.kostix@domain007.com>
In-Reply-To: <1296214676536-5969544.post@n2.nabble.com>

On Fri, 28 Jan 2011 03:37:56 -0800 (PST)
vikram2rhyme <vikram2rhyme@gmail.com> wrote:

> I am wondering why the tags are there in git. As they are just
> pointer to the commit
> we can refer those commit by SHA sum only then why tagging? Moreover a
> commit can
> be tagged more than once that result in multiple tags pointing to the
> same point in the history.
> Is this a design flaw?

Amending what other commenters said, I should note that beyond regular
tags which just provide human-readable names to objects, there exist
so-called "annotated tags" which are tags with descriptive messages
contained in them, which can be used as a side-channel to provide
additional information for commits, and also to digitally sign a line
of history to which such a tag is attached.

Also note that a tag can be attached to any object in a Git database,
not necessarily to a commit. This can be occasionally useful.