Trouble with cat-file on tags

[Sebastian Schuberth <sschuberth@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I was trying to use cat-file to get the hash of a tag object (not the hash of the commit object the tag points to), and I'm running into some issues. At the example of a cloned gerry [1] repository:

---8<---
$ git tag test-tag

$ git tag -l
test-tag
v0.0.3
v0.0.4
v0.1.0
v0.1.1
v0.1.2

$ git cat-file tag refs/tags/test-tag
fatal: git cat-file refs/tags/test-tag: bad file
---8<---

So for a newly created local tag, cat-file does not seem to work. However:

---8<---
$ git cat-file tag refs/tags/v0.1.2
object 91b0d21eba039e5ba0a90104c9c485735576dcbf
type commit
tag v0.1.2
tagger Travis Truman <travis_truman@cable.comcast.com> 1452693317 -0500

Version 0.1.2
---8<---

For an existing tag, git-file suddenly *does* seem to work, although I'm puzzled why I'm getting info on the commit object here. I thought "cat-file tag" should explicitly make "cat-file" list information about the tag object itself, not about the commit object the tag points to.

Thoughts?

[1] https://github.com/trumant/gerry

Regards,
Sebastian