Re: newbie questions about git design and features (some wrt hg)

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Feb 3, 2007, 21:41 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0702031334400.8424@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070203212030.GA91453@kobe.laptop>

On Sat, 3 Feb 2007, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> Sure it is.  Maybe not in the context of all projects or all teams, but
> properly versioning tag names and knowing who installed the tag, and
> when is quite often an issue with unversioned tags in some of the teams
> I have worked with.

I don't understand why you argue. Everybody agrees. This is not what I've been arguing against.

Git tags too (unless you are lazyor just don't _want_ to version them) are versioned. It's the whole reason why git has a whole separate "tag space". Not only that, but they are evencryptographically signed (again, this is not forced on you, but it's part of standard practice in git projects) with an author key, so that the tag actually says a lot more than just the version - it also gives you authenticity guarantees.

In the gitk history viewer, when you click on the tag, it will show you that. It will show you who tagged it, and when, and if two people tag with the same tag-name (or the same person renames a tag), you can use that to see which one you have.

So nobody disputes at all that it's good to see that kind of detail.

What I claim is simple: tags are independent of history. The fact that you have the history, doesn't necessarily mean that you should have the tag. Because some tags make sense for some people.

And it's *not* about being private to a repository. The relevance simply isn't a black-and-white "one repo or all repos" kind of choice. For example, you might have private tags within a company, and not choose to export those outside of the company.

		Linus