What to do if the path of my git submodules change upstream

Hi everyone!

First setup of my git was a server (with ssh) and some clients.

Today I changed to gitolite because I wanted a more sophisticated way of managing my repos. So far so good… So the old path “ssh://[ip]/[fullpath].git” would change to a new path “git@[servername]:[gitreponame]”. This is no problem for “normal” repos, I change the remote origin and continue using push and pull.

I have some submodules: I changed the .gitmodules to reflect my changes, did a git submodule sync. This works flawlessly too!

But what if someone wants to checkout an older version of the project? (for comparison, or because he/she wanted to try something out) He would get an old .gitmodules with old paths. After a git submodule sync he would get errors, because old paths won’t work anymore, because I changed some paths on the server

It is only one project I have this problem and therein I changed the .gitmodules only 3 times. Is it possible to rewrite .gitmodules on these specific  commits on the server (perhaps with git-filter-branch)? Or is there another easy solution? Has someone ever had this problem?

Hope you can help, Kind regards, Harald Heigl