Subject: Re: Updated git HOWTO for kernel hackers

From: Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 23:06:07 -0400

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> What I'm saying is that for a tagged release, that really translates to
> "please pull tag xyz from repo abc" and the tools like git-ssh-pull will 
> just do the right thing: they'll pull the tag itself _and_ they'll pull 
> the objects it points to.

Yes, everything does the right there here.

> Of course, right now "git fetch" is hardcoded to always write FETCH_HEAD 
> (not the tag name), but I'm saying ythat _literally_ you can do this 
> already:
> 
> 	git fetch repo-name tags/xyz &&
> 		( cat .git/FETCH_HEAD > .git/tags/xyz )
> 
> and it should do exactly what you want. Hmm?

No, not at all.  This sub-thread is all about tags/ dir updates.  Users 
should be able to do

	git pull-more rsync://...

and get ALL of .git/refs/tags/* that have appeared since their last update.

Concrete example:  I have a git tree on local disk.  I need to find out 
where, between 2.6.12-rc1 and 2.6.12, a driver broke.  This requires 
that I have -ALL- linux-2.6.git/refs/tags on disk already, so that I can 
bounce quickly and easily between tags.

It is valuable to have a local copy of -all- tags, -before- you need 
them.  That is why people like me and GregKH use rsync directly.  We 
want EVERYTHING in the kernel.org linux-2.6.git tree, not just what we 
know we need right now.

	Jeff