Question

What are the tags that end with ‘^{}’? They don’t actually exist in the bare repository.

$ git ls-remote -t origin
55f09717db93733b8f151763e7e28628f3f22129        refs/tags/Init
dce13158fff0e95b8adcc5628f193a8c03bada9c        refs/tags/Init^{}
2c9f64c306aa76e5b689bc2ffb41163aa255ac40        refs/tags/kaos-red
0970feca84d87df60ec5e943da2f55f1947fd0a3        refs/tags/legacy
dce13158fff0e95b8adcc5628f193a8c03bada9c        refs/tags/legacy^{}

When I try to delete them with “git push :legacy^{}” for example, git responds

fatal: remote part of refspec is not a valid name in :Init^{}

So where are they coming from? Is it a bug in ls-remote?

Answer 1

The git rev-parse manual describes the various ways you can specify commits or other objects in git. For this case it says:

^{}, e.g. v0.99.8^{}
A suffix ^ followed by an empty brace pair means the object could be a tag, and dereference the tag recursively until a non-tag object is found.