Thanks for the reply!
On 14/08/2019 17:40, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Why is the user mucking with
> that directory in the first place, and isn't the flagging of the
> situation as an error, done with 26f80ccf ("submodule: migrate
> get_next_submodule to use repository structs", 2018-11-28), a
> bugfix? If not, why not?
Not sure if you're implying here that this is not a bug; I'd say that:
- Mucking about with a folder that's supposed to contain a submodule is
not something that a lot of people do (and we worked around the issue),
and people shouldn't do that, but...
- ... regardless, I believe that "git fetch" shouldn't particularly care
about the state of the current working directory. I didn't ask it to do
anything with the submodules, nor have I initialised them. In my
(limited) knowledge of git, I'd expect git fetch to do its magic
entirely between the remote and the .git folder.
Our use case was for a submodule containing encrypted secrets; and the
mucking about was stubbing out those secrets in a test build without
fetching/decrypting them.
It's arguable whether this should be fixed or not; less arguable that we
could use a better error message and consistency (1st execution fails,
2nd does not).
