git submodule support feedback

Hello,

I've started using submodule support in one of my projects. I was previously using my own poorman's submodule support where I kept the commit in a file, .gitmodules. Git's new submodule support is superior to this method and doesn't lose me any features over what I had so I thought I'd change.

My general comment is that it's great. I've tried to trip it up a few times, but it works exactly as one would expect. I was surprised how little I had to understand in order to make it work, I didn't even need git update-index. git-add and git-rm work fine when the directory you're adding is a git repository in itself. Lovely.

I'll report further as I come across any stumbling blocks; but here is one to get you going: (It's not a problem with git really, and the workaround is simple, I'm reporting it for your information rather than to get it fixed).

In the master branch I deleted my .gitmodules file and did
 
 $ git add submodule
 $ git commit -m "Chuck poorman's-submodule use gitman's-submodule"

This took over the submodule management beautifully. Now, I swapped to another branch and tried to merge the master branch:

 $ git checkout somebranch
 $ git merge master
 fatal: Updating 'submodule' would lose untracked files in it
 Merge with strategy recursive failed.

I appreciate why this has happened - submodule, from the point of view of git - doesn't exist in that branch, but the directory always has, as that's where I've kept it as my pseudo-submodule. The fix was to do

 $ mv submodule submodule.tmp
 $ git merge master
 $ rmdir submodule
 $ mv submodule.tmp submodule

I bring this up only because anyone who's moving from non-submodule to submodule support might run into the same problem.

In short: great stuff - this is already more facility than I had, thanks chaps.

Andy