I am trying to get Jenkins to build off a Git repository when tags following a particular naming appear or change (typically "release-*").

I tried different ways, using refs/tags/release-* as Branch Specifier (in Branches to build), without any luck.

Digging into the code, it seems that the DefaultBuildChooser only takes branches into consideration, not tags (save for some special case when polling a single branch, but then the tag is still not promoted as a candidate).

Wouldn't it be useful to also allow to build off tags?

If there is an alternative way, I'd be curious to hear that too.