Some git tags not visible in gitk

Question

In the gitk view, I notice some (but not all) git tags missing. git tag shows those tags, and I am also able to checkout by specifying those tags, so the tags got created correctly. What should I try to understand and debug this problem?

Answer 1

Without the --all parameter, gitk shows only parent commits of your current HEAD. When calling gitk with this parameter, you should see the entire history with all commits (and all tags).

Answer 2

gitk <otherthings> --tags

gitk <otherthings> --tags=<pattern>

Example:

gitk --all --tags=save_201811*

shows me all my save_points this month.

With the -all option alone, gitk will not necessarily display all the tags.

I often tag the current state in git with something like git tag save_20181123_1054. That way, if anything goes wrong with my git rebase I can restore the current state, and after rebasing I can verify (with git diff save_20181123_1054) that I have the same changes (i.e. working and tested software) but more logically organized.

After the git rebase, I have a nice branch with perfect fixes, but the save-tag is a hanging leaf on my tree of development.

Opening gitk a day or two later will not show these tagged hanging leaves, even if invoked with gitk -all.

gitk --tags is the solution but in practice you'll probably want --all too or something else to avoid getting only the tags.

You might want to experiment with ...

gitk HEAD --tags
gitk <mybranch> --tags
gitk --all --tags