Swap “Latest release” on github

Question

I have a repository on a github.

Here is the graph:

Here is my action sequ

Answer 1

I am not aware of any way to do this directly in GitHub. The "latest release" is determined from the timestamps on your tags, not from the semantics of their names.

In the past I have solved this problem on my own personal projects by deleting the problematic older tag:

git tag -d v0.1.0
git push --delete origin v0.1.0

and recreating it with a fake date:

GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="2013-12-31 00:00" git tag -a v0.1.0.1 b217332279 -m "release 0.1.0.1"
git push --tags origin master

This is documented in the manpage for git-tag:

On Backdating Tags

If you have imported some changes from another VCS and would like to add tags for major releases of your work, it is useful to be able to specify the date to embed inside of the tag object; such data in the tag object affects, for example, the ordering of tags in the gitweb interface.

To set the date used in future tag objects, set the environment variable GIT_COMMITTER_DATE (see the later discussion of possible values; the most common form is "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM").

For example:

$ GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="2006-10-02 10:31" git tag -s v1.0.1

Note that this same manpage strongly recommends against reusing the same tag name:

On Re-tagging

What should you do when you tag a wrong commit and you would want to re-tag?

If you never pushed anything out, just re-tag it. Use "-f" to replace the old one. And you're done.

But if you have pushed things out (or others could just read your repository directly), then others will have already seen the old tag. In that case you can do one of two things:

1. The sane thing. Just admit you screwed up, and use a different name. Others have already seen one tag-name, and if you keep the same name, you may be in the situation that two people both have "version X", but they actually have different "X"'s. So just call it "X.1" and be done with it.

2. The insane thing. You really want to call the new version "X" too, even though others have already seen the old one. So just use git tag -f again, as if you hadn't already published the old one.

However, Git does not (and it should not) change tags behind users back. So if somebody already got the old tag, doing a git pull on your tree shouldn't just make them overwrite the old one.

If somebody got a release tag from you, you cannot just change the tag for them by updating your own one. This is a big security issue, in that people MUST be able to trust their tag-names. If you really want to do the insane thing, you need to just fess up to it, and tell people that you messed up. You can do that by making a very public announcement saying:

Ok, I messed up, and I pushed out an earlier version tagged as X. I then fixed something, and retagged the fixed tree as X again.

If you got the wrong tag, and want the new one, please delete the old one and fetch the new one by doing:

git tag -d X  
git fetch origin tag X

to get my updated tag.

You can test which tag you have by doing

git rev-parse X

which should return 0123456789abcdef.. if you have the new version.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Does this seem a bit complicated? It should be. There is no way that it would be correct to just "fix" it automatically. People need to know that their tags might have been changed.

I would only reuse the same tag if your project is relatively isolated and you can reliably contact everybody who may be using the code.

For more details about deleting remote tags have a look at this question.

Answer 2

In addition to Chris's answer, please note that if you re-publish the tag as he mentioned, but then you edit the description on GitHub, this will make it the latest tag again.