[RFC PATCH 0/2] better handle .gitmodules merge conflicts

This series contains a test to reproduce and a first attempt to fix the problem that "git diff", "git status" and "git fetch" die early when the .gitmodules file contains merge conflict markers. As I am not aware of any bug reports yet it looks like that either doesn't happen very often in the wild ("git diff" parses the .gitmodules file since 1.7.3, but even as heavy submodule users we only hit this once just recently) or the users encountering this problem just know what to do: resolve the conflict and carry on.

But that is no excuse to behave so unfriendly, especially as this can happen in a completely normal workflow, when e.g. two users are adding different submodules in separate branches and they get merged. So this RFC patch is my first attempt to avoid those commands dying.

In a second step a merge helper capable of merging inifiles would make sense. This should be enabled for the .gitmodules file by default and avoid most of the merge conflicts, e.g. when two users add different submodules in separate branches. But that is a different patch ...

Heiko Voigt (1):
  test that git status works with merge conflict in .gitmodules

Jens Lehmann (1):
  Submodules: Don't parse .gitmodules when it contains merge conflicts

 submodule.c                 |   23 +++++++++-
 t/t7506-status-submodule.sh |  100 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
 2 files changed, 117 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)