--no-tags doesn't appear to be working as intended

From: Ben Denhartog <ben@sudoforge.com>
Date: May 2, 2020, 21:01 UTC
Message-ID: <7480e635-97cc-4acd-875e-54bc71a88068@www.fastmail.com>

From the documentation, it would appear that `--no-tags` should avoid pulling tags, even if they point to refs which match the refspec being fetched:

>        -n, --no-tags
>            By default, tags that point at objects that are downloaded from the remote repository are fetched and
>            stored locally. This option disables this automatic tag following. The default behavior for a remote may
>            be specified with the remote.<name>.tagOpt setting. See git-config(1).

This, however, does not appear to be the case: Either using the `--no-tags` flag on the command line directly or setting `remote.<name>.tagopt = --no-tags` appears to be ignored when running `git-fetch`. This can be recreated simply:

``` # /tmp/a will be our "origin" # /tmp/b will be our "fork" mkdir /tmp/{a,b}

# set up the origin git -C /tmp/a init echo "Hello, world" >/tmp/a/README git -C /tmp/a add README git -C /tmp/a commit -m 'initial commit' git -C /tmp/a tag 0.0.1 HEAD

# set up the fork git -C /tmp/b init git -C /tmp/b remote add -f --no-tags upstream file:///tmp/a ```

You'll see the 0.0.1 tag being fetched. You can delete it all you want, set the `remote.upstream.tagopt = --no-tags`, etc -- it will always be pulled. This is the opposite behavior I would expect based on the available documentation and discussion around the tag in the mailing list.

-- 
  Ben Denhartog
  ben@sudoforge.com