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

[Brendan Cully <brendan@kublai.com>]

On Friday, 02 February 2007 at 10:32, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, 2 Feb 2007, Brendan Cully wrote:
> 
> > On Friday, 02 February 2007 at 08:42, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > > 
> > > 
> > > On Fri, 2 Feb 2007, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > Gaaah. Why anyone would want to have non-propagated tags?
> > > 
> > > That's *definitely* not the mistake.
> > > 
> > > I use private tags (and branches, for that matter) all the time. I'd be 
> > > very upset indeed if all my tags were always pushed out when I push 
> > > something out.
> > > 
> > > The mistake seems to be to think that tags get "versioned", and are part 
> > > of the tree history. That's insane. It means that you can never have a tag 
> > > to a newer tree than the one you are on.
> > 
> > The tags you use can simply be those from the tip of the repository,
> > regardless of which revision you've currently checked out.
> 
> Did you not understand the problem?
> 
> If I want to push out my history, that does NOT mean that I don't want to 
> push out my tags. At least not to the public sites. I migth want to push 
> them out to my other *private* copies, though.

I don't think I do, no. (Maybe it's the double negative construction.)
Local tags don't get pushed. Tags on private branches don't get
pushed. Tags on public branches do. This business you describe, where
you push tags around completely separate from the revisions they tag,
sounds a little odd. But nothing stops you from maintaining your local
tags in their own repository, if that's what makes you happy.

> In other words, tags are just like branches. You don't tie two tags 
> together, because one may (and does) make sense without the other.

Which tags are being tied together?

> Tying tags into history is silly. They're not "part of" history. They are 
> pointers *to* history. And trying to make them part of history has all 
> these obvious problems.

It seems to me they clearly do have history.