Re: [PATCH 1/2] clone: Fix error message for reference repository

From: Aaron Schrab <aaron@schrab.com>
Date: Apr 8, 2013, 16:17 UTC
Message-ID: <20130408161745.GK27178@pug.qqx.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vip3xyr8c.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

At 08:30 -0700 08 Apr 2013, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>You switch to a version of the superproject with a plain file at
>dirA/ or there is nothing at dirA.  The checkout will fail and you
>need to manually rectify the situation [*1*], but after that is
>done, you do not have any repository at /path/to/super/dirA/.git
>anymore.
>
>That was the reason why I recommended against the practice.

So you're essentially saying you don't want to support using a new-world submodule as a reference because using an old-world submodule as such is likely to be problematic? Even though the type of submodule that is actually likely to cause problems would currently be accepted as a reference repository? That seems somewhat perverse to me.

Also, nothing in this series is strictly about submodules; that just happens to be what I was working with when I noticed the issue. It would apply to any repository created with --separate-git-dir, although submodules are likely to be the most common occurrence by far.

>So you are right that we do not remove in the new world order, but
>then --reference can be given to point at the real location ;-)

Yes, that's definitely a possibility. But I think that the location of the work tree for a repository is much more likely to come to a user's mind than the location of a non-bare repository. Especially when dealing with submodules where the repository location was decided for the user, and is somewhat of an implementation detail that the user shouldn't need to care about.