Git couldn't find remote ref for a tag or commit hash

Question

I am trying to pull (I also get the same problem with fetch) to a specific tag on a remote branch. I am trying to run:

 git pull origin v0.0.2.1

Where v0.0.2.1 is the name of my tag. I get this error message:

fatal: Couldn't find remote ref v0.0.2.1
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

I get the same error message if I replace "v0.0.2.1" with the hash for that tag or the hash for the commit the tag refers to.

I have checked that the remote does actually have this tag and this commit (in fact I can successfully run the above commands on a different machine that has this repository). I checked that the .git/config files are the same on both of these machines.

The following still works:

 git pull origin HEAD

Also, I used

git ls-remote origin

And I get the following (among other things):

016d51475640e738b24cce2fb4019649ed81fa6b    refs/tags/v0.0.2.1

Does anyone know what is going on?

I have found a workaround: The following works:

 git pull origin refs/tags/v0.0.2.1

This works for my task, but I would really like to understand more about why this works and the other approach doesn't. If anyone can provide an explanation that would be awesome.

Answer 1

When reading the changelogs of git 's version 1.7.0 to 1.7.9 we can find several entries which might lead to the explanation. The way ref-lookups are done on the remote-side has changed (to speed up things).

This can explain why version 1.7.0 needs refs/tags/<tagname> for fetching and 1.7.10 doesn't.