Re: Feature request: separate namespace for remote tags

[Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 7:44 AM, Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com> wrote:
> Currently, 'git remote add foo ...' will allocate a separate namespace for
> foo branches (refs/remotes/foo/*) but will store foo tags in the main tag
> namespace (refs/tags/*).  This leads to several problems:
>
> - the main tag namespace becomes polluted with zillions of tags
> - if the tags from a remote conflict with a local (or perhaps another
> remote) tag, information is lost
> - 'git remote rm' will not delete the remote tags, and so 'git gc' will not
> recover much of the space used by the remote

I've sometimes wished for such a feature myself.  When merging things
using git-subtree, for example, you can easily end up importing
"v1.2.3" type tags from two different projects and causing yourself
total confusion.

However, just dividing the tags into namespaces removes one of the
nicest features of tags, which is that they uniquely identify a
particular revision across all repositories.  The whole point is that
ap/v1.2.3 isn't ever supposed to differ from origin/v1.2.3.

One option would be to split the tags into namespaces, but then
automatically search all namespaces when looking for a particular tag.
 Then when you drop a particular remote, you'd lose all its tags, but
if you *don't* drop that remote, things look like they always have.

Have fun,

Avery