Re: [PATCH v2 0/3] Teach fetch and pull to recursively fetch submodules too

From: Jens Lehmann <jens.lehmann@web.de>
Date: Oct 9, 2010, 19:17 UTC
Message-ID: <4CB0BFDB.7010503@web.de>
In-Reply-To: <FB03A7DB-67D2-4EAE-A0F0-2F3E3CEA9878@sb.org>

Am 07.10.2010 00:52, schrieb Kevin Ballard:

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> On Oct 5, 2010, at 2:06 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> I dunno.  I've never been a fan of automatically recursing into submodules
>> (iow, treating the nested structure as if there is no nesting), so...
> 
> I agree with this as well.

There are use cases like mine where automatic recursion is just the right thing to do. But I would be fine with having to turn the recursion on explicitly in the configuration if most people think recursion is not a desirable default. It would be really nice to hear from other submodule users what they think about that ...

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> After thinking on it a bit, I think the best solution is to add a switch
> --submodules to fetch which will also fetch all submodules, but otherwise
> fetch will fetch no submodules. This will avoid the problem of detecting
> changed submodules, while still allowing users to explicitly request all
> submodules in case they're about to get on a plane flight.
> And of course we can use a config switch to turn --submodules on or off
> by default.

And apart from the default setting and the name of the option this is exactly what this patch series does, or am I missing something? I could rename the option from '--recursive' to '--submodules' if that is requested (I chose the former for consistency reasons as it is already used by "git clone" for the same purpose; and IMO we should then use the same option name for recursive checkout and grep too).

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> We should also give some thought to automatically updating submodules
> when `git pull` is performed. I could imagine `git pull --submodules`
> effectively doing `git pull && git submodule update --init --recursive`,
> though this implies submodule updating behavior as part of merge, and
> it seems harder to justify that.

This is the goal of my recursive checkout effort ("update" being the easier part, "--init" the harder). And if you have recursive checkout enabled, I think it is justified to update the submodules as part of the merge.