Re: git fetch slow as molasses due to tag downloading

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

IMHO this should be solved as a filter: "git-show-ref --stdin 
--show-invalid". Thus, git does not have to traverse _every_ ref for 
_every_ incoming tag.

That sounds like a too specialized hack to me.  We should first
speed up the general "--verify $ref" case; as you corrected me
earlier it still has a useless loop.

If it is still too slow (which I suspect it could be the case,
with fork+exec overhead), we should _also_ pursue the filter
approach, but even then I think "filter out the valid ones" is a
specialized hack, if you mean "show only the invalid one's
names" by --show-invalid.

It would make sense to do

        $ git show-ref --show-invalid v1.0.0 v2.6.18
        f665776185ad074b236c00751d666da7d1977dbe refs/tags/v1.0.0
        - refs/tags/v2.6.18

(and its equivalent to take refs from --stdin) though.