Re: Slow fetches of tags

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

Junio? Any ideas? I didn't want to do that tag-auto-following, and while I 
admit it's damn convenient, it's really quite broken, methinks. 

I think the current setup is broken on two counts.  If you fetch
without remote tracking branch, I suspect that we end up asking
for the tip of the remote again -- because there is no ref that
says "this commit is known to be complete -- we just fetched
from them successfully".

But I think what Ralf is seeing is a bit different.  The example
given:

  git fetch git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/\
       linux-2.6.16.y.git master:v2.6.16-stable

does use a tracking branch, and when the tag following kicks in,
v2.6.16-stable head should have been updated.  I suspect it is
just its head commit is older than tips of other branches, and
purely date based sorting done by fetch-pack.c::get_rev() ends
up walking them before it gets to the tip of the branch we just
fetched.

I wonder if we can do a dirty hack to give bias to commits
coming from refs that are newer (on the local filesystem -- that
is, mtime of .git/refs/heads/v2.6.16-stable must be a lot newer
than .git/refs/heads/master in this case because we just fetched
it)...