alt Hacker NewsLuckily commonly used forges for collaboration have the ability to make tags immutable. Any repository where multiple people collaborate on a project should have that feature enabled by default. I'm still waiting for the day where tags are immutable by default with no option exposed to change it.
I'm sure that would cause problems for some, but transitive labels already exist in Git: branches.
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As long as we can create and delete tags, they will never be immutable, right?
Tags are just a text file with a name and the sha of the tag object (with the commit and some metadata/signatures as contents), last I checked. It's deliberately simple and thus almost impossible to actually lock it down in concrete terms.
Packed refs are a little more complicated but all of the storage formats in git are trivial to manually edit or write a tool to handle, in extremis.
I dont find the idea of a immutable "descriptive" tag or branch to be that useful (I also dont find the differentiation of tags and branches to be useful either) I've seen plenty of repositories where tags end up being pretty ambiguous compared to each other or where "release-20xx" does not actually point to the official 20xx release. Immutable references are more typically handled by builders and lockfiles to which Git already has a superior immutable reference system, the commit hash.