Question

If there are tags in the remote repository, I’m usually getting them automatically when pulling. When I delete the created local tag (git tag -d <tag-name>) and pull, the deleted tag will be recreated. I can delete remote branches/tags (git push <remote-branch/tag-name>:<branch/tag-name>), but how can I detect that the local tag was created by fetching a remote tag?

Answer 1

If you’re annoyed about these tags being recreated when you run git pull, you turn off the fetching of tags by default with the remote.<remote-name>.tagopt config setting. e.g. if the remote is origin, then you can do:

git config remote.origin.tagopt --no-tags

Update: to address your comment, the reason that I suggest this is that there’s not an obvious way to tell the difference between a tag that was created locally and one that was fetched from a remote. There’s also no reflog for tags. So, my suggestion is to suppress automatic fetching of tags – you can then fetch them yourself into a different namespace. For example, you could do:

git fetch origin +refs/tags/*:refs/tags/origin/*

… and perhaps create an alias for that. Then when you want to fetch tags, they’ll be named, for example, refs/tags/origin/tag1 instead of refs/tags/tag1.

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If you want this to happen automatically, you could change your .git/config to list multiple refspecs for fetching, e.g.:

 [remote "origin"]
      url = whoever@whereever:whatever.git
      fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
      fetch = +refs/tags/*:refs/tags/origin/*

… which is suggested in Pro Git.