Re: Git Submodule Problem - Bug?

From: Jens Lehmann <jens.lehmann@web.de>
Date: Nov 29, 2011, 17:42 UTC
Message-ID: <4ED5196B.5030200@web.de>
In-Reply-To: <20111129104105.GA10839@kolya>

Am 29.11.2011 11:41, schrieb Fredrik Gustafsson:

Show 7 quoted lines

> On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 11:25:41AM +0100, Thomas Rast wrote:
>> So maybe the right questions to ask would be: what's the *official*
>> way of removing a submodule completely?  Do we support overwriting
>> submodules in the way Manuel wanted to?  Why not? :-)
> 
> I suggest that we add a command for that;
> git submodule remove <submodule>

Hmm, to me it looks like the problem is in "git submodule add". It doesn't check if the submodule repo it finds in .git/modules matches the one the user wants to create. So we end up reviving the first submodule although the user wants to use a completely different repo.

One solution could be to only let "git submodule update" revive submodules from .git/modules and make "git submodule add" error out if it finds the git directory of a submodule with the same name in .git/modules. But currently there is no way to tell "git submodule add" to use a different submodule name (it always uses the path as a name), so we might have to add an option to do that and tell the user in the error message how he can add a different submodule under the same path.

Another solution could be that "git submodule add" detects that a submodule with the name "sub" did exist and chooses a different name (say "sub2") for the the new one. Then the user wouldn't have to cope with the problem himself.