Cloning a remote tag without using git-fetch-pack directly?

From

Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>

Date

Apr 19, 2011, 22:20 UTC

Message-ID

<20110419222050.GA3304@feather>

Using fetch-pack, I can clone a single tag from a repository:

This is the final 2.6.12 release
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

commit 9ee1c939d1cb936b1f98e8d81aeffab57bae46ab
Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@ppc970.osdl.org>
Date:   Fri Jun 17 12:48:29 2005 -0700

    Linux 2.6.12

diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index 9e005e1..0d1e74d 100644
--- a/Makefile



However, I can't seem to find any way to convince git clone to do the
same thing for me.  git clone will clone a branch, but not a tag.

/tmp/testrepo$ git clone /home/josh/src/linux-2.6/.git -b refs/tags/v2.6.12
Cloning into linux-2.6...
done.
warning: Remote branch refs/tags/v2.6.12 not found in upstream origin, using HEAD instead


On a different note, git fetch-pack seems to silently fail if asked to
fetch a remote tag which points at a tree object rather than a commit
object:

/tmp/testrepo$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/testrepo/.git/
/tmp/testrepo$ git fetch-pack /home/josh/src/linux-2.6/.git refs/tags/v2.6.12-tree
(1) /tmp/testrepo$ echo $?
1


I realize that I want to do something strange here, but it seems like a
kind of strange that git already supports in at least some ways, just
not in others.  Am I missing something?

Thanks,
Josh Triplett