Re: Don't add tags to ELPA packages -- documentation?

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Jonas Bernoulli <jonas@bernoul.li> writes:

> Kévin Le Gouguec <kevin.legouguec@gmail.com> writes:
>
> Let's document that tags should not be pushed; both why and how,
> as described elsewhere in this thread.

I sent an in a README patch a couple of messages up-thread.

> But I expect that tags will still occasionally be pushed anyway.
> When that happens we should figure out what upstream repository
> they came from, educate the respective maintainer about how to
> avoid pushing them again, and then delete them.

This looks fairly simple. Tags can be deleted locally with:

git tag --delete <tagname>

and deleted from the upstream repo with:

git push origin :refs/tags/<tagname>

Apparently pushing an empty :tagname does the trick; thank you git for
more unintuitive syntax. The "refs/tags" is safer since tags and
branches have separate namespaces and we might hit a branch by accident.

> But [because it is going to keep happening] this is more important:
>
>> Mmm, IIUC any of "git clone", "git fetch" and "git pull" can fetch tags
>> if not used with "--no-tags".  A quick look at elpa-admin.el shows some
>> occurrences of "pull" without "--no-tags", but I haven't looked hard
>> enough at the GNU ELPA machinery to figure if those could have fetched
>> the tags we observe.
>
> Every occurrence of "git clone ..." and "git remote add ..." in the
> documentation should be updated to mention that "--no-tags" has to be
> used to prevent tags from being pulled.  We should also document how to
> recover if the tags have already been pulled.  And finally we should add
> an annotated tag named something like "use--no-tags" and use its
> annotation to repeat the documentation about adding "--no-tags" and how
> to clean up.
>
>      Jonas