Tags found in thepacked-refs file that can be created by the Git commandgit pack-refs do not have to be UTF8 encoded. In these cases, GitPython fails to read these tags due to assuming they should be UTF8 compatible.

The source for this issue is found here:
https://github.com/gitpython-developers/GitPython/blob/main/git/refs/symbolic.py#L124

withopen(cls._get_packed_refs_path(repo),"rt",encoding="UTF-8")asfp:

A working example (using a repository with a non-utf8 tag):

git clone https://github.com/ACRA/acracd acra

Create a Python script with the following content:

importgitrepo=git.Repo(".")print(repo.tags)

Execute the script:

python script.py

Result:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 6216: invalid continuation byte