On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 12:32:51PM -0700, Bryan Turner wrote:

quoted

        $ git ls-remote -n1 --tags --sort=v:refname origin "v*"

[...]
With the v2 wire protocol, the client could provide a prefix (like
`refs/tags/`, or potentially `refs/tags/v`) to reduce what the server
included in the ref advertisement, but even the v2 protocol doesn't
have anything for telling the server "Version parse these names and
then return the first N". That means the parsing, sorting and trimming
for the advertised tags would still all have to happen locally. (I'm
sure someone can correct me if I've misstated what protocol v2 can do
for filtering, but I don't see any "ls-refs" options that look like
they enable anything other than prefix matching.)

No, that sounds right. The "--tags" in the original command should cause
v2 to ask only for refs/tags/. But because of the way ls-remote matching
works, "v*" is not a pure prefix match, and would find
"refs/tags/foo/v1.2.3". So we can't use protocol-level matching to ask
for "refs/tags/v*".

There are no provisions in the protocol for sorting, nor for limiting
the output.

I didn't check, but I suspect some hosting-platform APIs might be able
to answer this with a single query.

-Peff