From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2020 19:06:13 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] fetch: document and test --refmap=""
Message-ID: <20200121190613.GB11027@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <a87b9fc2-dae4-7e39-5aab-243ba9679531@gmail.com>

On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 01:01:47PM -0500, Derrick Stolee wrote:

> > This isn't strictly related to your patch, but since the rationale here
> > describes the concept of a background job and people might end up using
> > it as a reference, do you want to add in --no-tags to help them out?
> 
> That's a good idea. I keep forgetting about that. It's interesting that
> tags are fetched even though my refpsec does not include refs/tags.

Yeah, because tag-following is an extra thing outside of the refspecs. I
think it would be nice if there were a way to specify a "following"
refspec, something like:

  ~refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*

(where "~" is just a character I picked out of the blue that I think
doesn't have any other meaning there now). And then we could specify it
in the config alongside other refspecs, override it with a refmap, etc.

As a bonus, it would also give us a stepping stone towards being able to
do remote-specific tags like:

  [remote "origin"]
  url = ...
  fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/heads/*
  fetch = ~refs/tags/*:refs/remotes/origin/tags/*

But I'm sure there are a lot of backwards-compatibility gotchas.

-Peff