Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason [off-list ref] writes:

As a workaround for that maybe we'll need something like:

  [remote "gbenchmark"]
    url = git@github.com:google/benchmark
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/gbenchmark/*
    fetch = +refs/tags/*:refs/remote-tags/gbenchmark/*
	tagStyle = remote
    tagopt = --no-tags

Good thinking.  In the longer term we would probably want to
deprecate tagopt that was invented in a very lazy way (it was
originally meant to hold any random string that we can insert on the
shell command that invokes "git fetch", which obviously is not a
good idea in the production code) and replace it with something more
"controlled", and the above looks like a good improvement to Wink's
proposed change.

Or whatever, i.e. something where only the new version will fetch the
tags and ignore the tagopt option (which I never liked anyway). It's a
hack, but at least you don't end up with crap it your ref namespace by
flip-flopping between versions.