Latest posts

Limiting tags when using git fetch

Published: March 14, 2026

TL;DR

If you are using git tag --contains=<commit> but it becomes unworkable due to a flood of CI-generated tags, you can fix it by setting tagOpt = --no-tags in your configuration and by using negative refspecs, which limit the number of tags you are fetching. Both are placed on the remote.

[remote "upstream"]
  url = git@gitlab.com:owner/project.git
  fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/upstream/*
  tagOpt = --no-tags
  fetch = ^refs/tags/*-development

Tag explosions while needing to find commits in tags

At work, our CI creates tags for each build when our pipelines are completed. The reason is that our deployment tooling requires an identifier, and they have settled on using a tag. The problem for me with that is I have a repository that contains over 1000 tags. Previously, I could use git tag --contains <commit-ish> to see which release a commit was found in. I still have the ability to do so, but I needed to filter out all the automated nothingness of CI-generated tags.

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Question: How can I prevent multiple logins via lightDM

Published: February 9, 2026

Answer

I use xscreensaver and to forbid it:

! in .Xresources
xscreensaver.splash: false
! Set to nothing makes user switching not possible
*.newLoginCommand:

Lightdm supports .d directories, by default they aren’t created on Debian but upstream copy documents them clearly. In other words: /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/ is read.

Which means you need to drop a file, /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/10-local-overrides.conf and add the content:

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git status can now compare branches

Published: March 14, 2026

For those running a development version of git from master or next, you probably have seen it already. Today I was inspecting the git logs of git and found this little gem. It supports my workflow to the max.

You can now configure git status to compare branches with your current branch in status. When you configure status.comparebranches you can use @{upstream} and @{push} and you see both how far you’ve diverged from your upstream and your push branch. For those, like me, who track an upstream branch which differs from their push branch this is a mighty fine feature!

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