Fetching master branch with tags associated with it

[Dominik Salvet <dominik.salvet@gmail.com>]

Dear Git community,
For quite some time I am trying to solve a problem with fetching the
master branch from a remote with tags that are pointing only to the
master branch.

Cloning the master branch of a repository with tags only pointing to
that branch is working, though. In this case, the following command
will do the work: `git clone --branch master --single-branch <url> .`

Now, I want to refresh the repository the same way - fetching only
commits from the master branch and tags that are pointing to the
master branch and also refresh those tags as well in case of their
target commit change at the remote (you can expect that it always
points to a master commit). Nevertheless, I don't really know how to
do it. The closest I got, are the following commands:

```sh
git fetch --tags origin master &&
git merge FETCH_HEAD
```

However, there obviously are some problems with this solution. The
`--tags` flag will cause to fetch tags from all branches. Furthermore,
it will fetch also their commits, which is absolutely what I don't
want to.

I have Git 2.17.1 (on Ubuntu 18.04.2) and in its `git fetch --help` is
stated, if I understood it correctly, that without passing neither
`--tags` nor `--no-tags`, it will do exactly what I want.
Nevertheless, without using any of the mentioned flags, it behaves
more like using `--no-tags`.

Am I missing something? Do you want any additional information? I
would really appreciate your help.

Thank you for all your effort
-- 
Dominik Salvet