A couple errors dealing with uninitialized submodules

I was working with a fresh clone of a repository where I'd forgotten that one of the directories was setup as a submodule, so I hadn't initialized it.

I tried to add a symlink to a location outside the repository and this failed with an assertion (exact text in comment below). When looking into that I realized that the directory was meant to be a submodule and decided to try to change that. So I tried to remove the submodule, and got an error (misleadingly) saying that couldn't be done because it uses a .git directory.

I first noticed this with git 2.9.3 from Debian unstable, but I also see it building from v2.10.1-502-g6598894 fetched from master recently.

The following script replicates both of these issues. These could both be classified as "don't do that", although at lease the assertion is quite ugly.

--- >8 ---- #!/bin/sh -e

directory=$(mktemp -d)
echo "Using directory '$directory'"
cd $directory
git init --quiet orig
(
  cd orig
  # Using a random, small repository for the submodule.
  git submodule --quiet add https://github.com/diepm/vim-rest-console.git sub
  git commit -m init >/dev/null
)
git clone --quiet orig dup
cd dup

(
  cd sub
  ln -s /tmp/dont_care
  # Next command aborts with
  # git: pathspec.c:317: prefix_pathspec: Assertion `item->nowildcard_len <= item->len && item->prefix <= item->len' failed.`
  git add . || : expected to fail
)

rm -f .git/index.lock # Next command fails with error wrongly saying that the submodule uses a .git # directory. I believe that the real problem is that the uninitialized # submodule has content. git rm sub