Re: [1.8.0] Provide proper remote ref namespaces

[Nicolas Pitre <nico@fluxnic.net>]

On Fri, 4 Feb 2011, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> For some reason, many people seem to be enthused about splitting the tag
> namespace, but I am not sure if that is a good thing in general.  Branches
> are moving pointers for people to flip around in their local repositories,
> and it makes sense to say "My master is a bit ahead of the public one",
> but what would we gain by making it _easier_ to add and exchange many tags
> with the same name (e.g. refs/remotes/*/tags/v1.7.4 vs refs/tags/v1.7.4),
> other than the extra confusion?

The extraordinary misfeature of the tag namespace at the moment comes 
from the fact that whenever you add a remote repo to fetch, and do fetch 
it, then your flat tag namespace gets polluted with all the tags the 
remote might have.  If you decide to delete some of those remote 
branches, the tags that came with it are still there and 
indistinguishable from other tags making it a real pain to sort out.

So that's what has to be fixed.  If you get duplicated tag names then 
just warn the user and give priority to the local one, or error out with 
a "ambiguous tag specification" if no local but multiple remote tags 
with the same name are found (the user would have to be more precise in 
the tag scope in that case).


Nicolas