When creating and pushing a tag with the Git Publisher, it gets pushed to the remote repository as a branch. The console output shows:

Pushing tag 4.6.44.0.5 to repo XXX
RefSpec is "refs/tags/4.6.44.0.5:refs/heads/4.6.44.0.5".

This appears to be caused by a combination of:

• Line 272 in hudson.plugins.git.GitPublisher (in git-plugin)

  • PushCommand push = git.push().to(remoteURI).ref(tagName);
    

• The call to fixRefSpec() in org.jenkinsci.plugins.gitclient.JGitAPIImpl
  • This class is in git-client-plugin
  • Without a full reference passed to PushCommand.ref(), it defaults to prepending the name with "/refs/heads".
  • It should probably default to the prefix used in the source ref rather than "heads"

I don't know if the bug/fix is in git-plugin or git-client-plugin - probably the latter because the CLI client may work fine.