Re: git-fetch and unannotated tags

Andy Parkins <andyparkins@gmail.com> writes:

The answer to everything you want to change the current behaviour is to code something that implement that change. What else is new?

I suspect that if you look at what git-fetch.sh does in the paragraph that follows /^# automated tag following/, it probably is not that much change. At that point,

 (1) $ls_remote_result contains the output from "git ls-remote $URL"
     we ran earlier, LF and everything intact.

 (2) show-ref --exclude-existing=refs/tags/ discards, out of
     $ls_remote_result, everything that does not begin with refs/tags/,
     and at the same time, discards the ones you already have.
     This is done after stripping away ^{} markers.

 (3) The remainder is fed to the while loop, which says "if we
     already have the object pointed at by a surviving ref under
     refs/tags/ in the remote, follow that tag".

So I think you could filter out the ones that do not have corresponding ^{} in $ls_remote_result from the while loop. As the use of "show-ref --exclude-existing" is to speed things up by reducing the work done in the while loop written in shell, I would suggest giving another option to show-ref that can be used together with --exclude-existing.

Take a look at exclude_existing() function in builtin-show-ref.c; your additional option to the command would say something like:

  - ignore everything that do not begin with match (as we do now
    already);

  - if we do not have the ref we read from the stdin (determined
    with the call to path_list_has_path() there), instead of
    running printf() unconditionally as we do now, make sure we
    have both refs/tags/foo and refs/tags/foo^{} in the input.
    And show only those.