I am very surprised that ordering by date is less popular for tags than for branches Perhaps I should have explained that alphabetical order causes tag orderings like v0.1 < v0.11 < v0.2 < v0.3 …, which is entirely correct if your version numbers behave like decimal fractions and completely wrong if your version numbers behave like lexicographically-sorted series of integers separated by dots The latter is more popular nowadays, but using ‘natural’ ordering by name then breaks the other case