Stray `main` tag makes `git pull origin main` a silent no-op (tag shadows branch)
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Assessment
- Difficulty
- 1/5
- Estimated time
- Under an hour
- Newbie friendliness
- 65/100
Research direction
The issue identifies the accidental main tag and gives the proposed deletion command git push origin :refs/tags/main. Check the repository’s tag list and confirm that the main tag is the one described, then remove it. Verify that git fetch --dry-run origin main resolves to the branch afterward.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Summary
refs/tags/main (lightweight, → 0b3b528, #44) coexists with refs/heads/main. Git resolves an unqualified refspec by matching refs/tags/<name> before refs/heads/<name> (count_refspec_match() in remote.c), so the very common
git pull origin main
fetches the tag instead of the branch, then merges/rebases onto the tag's old commit. The command still exits 0, so the failure is silent: the checkout never updates.
Reproduction (against 0be7a76)
$ git fetch --dry-run origin main
* tag main -> FETCH_HEAD # expected: branch
$ git pull --rebase origin main
* tag main -> FETCH_HEAD
Already up to date. # exit 0, branch unchanged
A fully qualified refspec behaves correctly:
$ git fetch --dry-run origin refs/heads/main
* branch main -> FETCH_HEAD
Impact
Every client that passes the short branch name to git pull — GUI clients such as UGit do exactly git pull --recurse-submodules origin main, and so do many scripts — silently stops receiving updates. Worse, with pull.rebase=true the local branch can be moved backwards to 0b3b528: rebasing onto an ancestor of HEAD is reported as "already up to date", so the commits above it are dropped from the branch.
We hit precisely this: local main was rewound one commit, and three consecutive pull attempts returned success without applying the ~105 upstream commits. git fetch without a refspec was equally stale, because the branch half of the pull never ran.
git pull with no arguments is unaffected (it resolves branch.<name>.merge rather than matching a remote ref by name), which makes the problem easy to misdiagnose.
Suggested fix
Delete the stray tag — every other tag in this repository follows v*, so main looks accidental:
git push origin :refs/tags/main
(or Releases → Tags → main → Delete in the GitHub UI).
Workaround for affected clients until then
git pull --rebase origin refs/heads/main
Reproduced with git 2.45.2.windows.1 on Windows.
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First steps
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