Bear with me here, I hit this in a real repo. If you have an annotated tag of an annotated tag, and `remote update` elects not to fetch this tag (perhaps because it has a name collision locally), then the repo ends up corrupt: you can't gc it, but fsck doesn't notice. Two repos, named "bad" and "good": bad$ git tag -a inner bad$ git tag -a outer inner bad$ git tag -d inner bad$ git show outer tag outer Tagger: ... Date: ... This is the outer tag. tag inner Tagger: ... Date: ... This is the inner tag. commit 826365dcfec304a80b227a990f7d5c805bce3dd9 Author: ... ... bad$ git rev-parse outer 070707.. bad$ git cat-file tag outer object 03030303... good$ git tag -a outer # create a colliding tag good$ git remote add bad ../bad good$ git remote update warning: no common commits remote: Counting objects: 4, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done. remote: Total 4 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0) Unpacking objects: 100% (4/4), done. From ../bad * [new branch] master -> bad/master Note how it has not fetched the tag ref, but it has fetched one of the tag objects: $ git show 07070 error: Could not read object 0303030.. tag outer Tagger: ... $ git fsck ... dangling tag 07070... I actually don't get that on the real repo, but do on this testcase. Hmm. `git fsck` exits with success here. This is bad, as the object graph is incomplete? $ git gc fatal: bad object 03030303... error: failed to run repack `git gc` fails with this meaningless error. The attached patch improves the error. I don't know where the rest of the problem lies. What's the expected behaviour when a tag already exists locally, but is different? Fetch the object anyway, but ignore it?