fetch: add a --prune-tags option and fetch.pruneTags config

Add a --prune-tags option to git-fetch, along with fetch.pruneTags
config option and a -P shorthand (-p is --prune). This allows for
doing any of:

    git fetch -p -P
    git fetch --prune --prune-tags
    git fetch -p -P origin
    git fetch --prune --prune-tags origin

Or simply:

    git config fetch.prune true &&
    git config fetch.pruneTags true &&
    git fetch

Instead of the much more verbose:

    git fetch --prune origin 'refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*' '+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*'

Before this feature it was painful to support the use-case of pulling
from a repo which is having both its branches *and* tags deleted
regularly, and have our local references to reflect upstream.

At work we create deployment tags in the repo for each rollout, and
there's *lots* of those, so they're archived within weeks for
performance reasons.

Without this change it's hard to centrally configure such repos in
/etc/gitconfig (on servers that are only used for working with
them). You need to set fetch.prune=true globally, and then for each
repo:

    git -C {} config --replace-all remote.origin.fetch "refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*" "^\+*refs/tags/\*:refs/tags/\*$"

Now I can simply set fetch.pruneTags=true in /etc/gitconfig as well,
and users running "git pull" will automatically get the pruning
semantics I want.

Even though "git remote" has corresponding "prune" and "update
--prune" subcommands I'm intentionally not adding a corresponding
prune-tags or "update --prune --prune-tags" mode to that command.

It's advertised (as noted in my recent "git remote doc: correct
dangerous lies about what prune does") as only modifying remote
tracking references, whereas any --prune-tags option is always going
to modify what from the user's perspective is a local copy of the tag,
since there's no such thing as a remote tracking tag.

Ideally add_prune_tags_to_fetch_refspec() would be something that
would use ALLOC_GROW() to grow the 'fetch` member of the 'remote'
struct. Instead I'm realloc-ing remote->fetch and adding the
tag_refspec to the end.

The reason is that parse_{fetch,push}_refspec which allocate the
refspec (ultimately remote->fetch) struct are called many places that
don't have access to a 'remote' struct. It would be hard to change all
their callsites to be amenable to carry around the bookkeeping
variables required for dynamic allocation.

All the other callers of the API first incrementally construct the
string version of the refspec in remote->fetch_refspec via
add_fetch_refspec(), before finally calling parse_fetch_refspec() via
some variation of remote_get().

It's less of a pain to deal with the one special case that needs to
modify already constructed refspecs than to chase down and change all
the other callsites. The API I'm adding is intentionally not
generalized because if we add more of these we'd probably want to
re-visit how this is done.

See my "Re: [BUG] git remote prune removes local tags, depending on
fetch config" (87po6ahx87.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com;
https://public-inbox.org/git/87po6ahx87.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com/) for
more background info.

Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/fetch-options.txt b/Documentation/fetch-options.txt
index 9f5c85ad96..8631e365f4 100644
--- a/Documentation/fetch-options.txt
+++ b/Documentation/fetch-options.txt
@@ -73,7 +73,19 @@ ifndef::git-pull[]
 	are fetched due to an explicit refspec (either on the command
 	line or in the remote configuration, for example if the remote
 	was cloned with the --mirror option), then they are also
-	subject to pruning.
+	subject to pruning. Supplying `--prune-tags` is a shorthand for
+	providing the tag refspec.
++
+See the PRUNING section below for more details.
+
+-P::
+--prune-tags::
+	Before fetching, remove any local tags that no longer exist on
+	the remote if `--prune` is enabled. This option should be used
+	more carefully, unlike `--prune` it will remove any local
+	references (local tags) that have been created. This option is
+	a shorthand for providing the explicit tag refspec along with
+	`--prune`, see the discussion about that in its documentation.
 +
 See the PRUNING section below for more details.