On 07/05/13 07:16, Jens Lehmann wrote:
Am 06.05.2013 02:19, schrieb Chris Packham:
This did get me thinking. Why does an uninitialized submodule need to
have an empty directory? If it didn't the maintainer in question
probably would have realized that he needed to run git submodule
update --init when his cd submodule command failed.
I'm guessing there is a good reason for the empty directory - perhaps
so that git can notice the fact that it exists in the worktree but is
out of date? If it does need to have some presence in the worktree
why not as a file? That way the cd command would still fail (albeit
with a different error) providing the necessary indication to the
user. The submodule update --init could then change from file - dir
when it actually gets populated.
Hmm, to me an empty directory is the natural representation of an
unpopulated submodule, but I see why that made it hard for your
maintainer to notice the fact that the submodule was uninitialized.
I suspect changing an unpopulated submodule to be represented by a
file will surprise quite some users (some of which will probably
come up with perfectly valid use cases such a change will break).
What about the following: Today's Git completely ignores empty
submodule directories, but I think that when the recursive checkout
support is there, the submodule.autoupdate flag - which I believe
should control that behavior - could also make those empty submodule
directories show up in git status as being unpopulated (after all
they are configured to be updated automatically, so not having them
populated is something Git should show). Would something like this
have helped here?
Until then I can only propose to establish a best practice of using
git clone --recurse-submodules in these situations to avoid the
problem you described.
Yeah I think training people to use --recurse-submodules is probably the
best thing we can do with the current version of git on our developers
work stations. There is a bit of an issue when we add a new submodule
(people aren't used to using submodule update --init), but that isn't a
frequent occurrence.
The recursive checkout sounds like something we'd benefit from.
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