Petr Baudis [off-list ref] writes:
It takes loooong time, unfortunately - scp -r takes its time itself on
many small files, and then we have to make a separate call to
git-ssh-fetch for each tag. Isn't that braindamaged... :/
I think you could run git-peek-remote to find all the refs and
then run git-fetch-pack to slurp all the tags (and heads for
that matter) at once. Is there a particular reason you would
prefer the commit walker?