Proper way to checkout a tag?

Hi. We tag our releases with names like "release-0", "release-1" and so forth. Tags (lightweight ones) seem like the perfect markers for these releases since we want a reference that can't ever change (as opposed to a head).

The problem is that since there's no head pointing to each release, if our users just:

$ git checkout release-1

When they want to build that release, they get into a detached HEAD state. I've always construed detached HEAD as a non-standard state, and it doesn't seem proper to reach it regularly in the course of a standard operation like checking out past releases.

It's particularly confusing for our users who are new to Git.

Any thoughts, or alternative methods to do this?

Thanks, D