Re: [PATCH] builtin/describe.c: ignore untracked changes in submodules

Yes, but I - and others included in that discussion some time ago - could not come up with a sane and simple solution to that problem.

The core of this issue is that for git a file is either untracked, modified or clean.
But submodules can have every combination of all these states - as they consist
of multiple files - and additionally their HEAD can differ from the commit recorded
in the superproject. So basically I see two ways to handle that:
a) add new states for an entry to represent all missing combinations of possible
   states for submodules and tell all porcelain to handle these.
b) simplify this problem by having a submodule show up as modified when
   either of these three conditions are met (and enable the user to choose what
   conditions she wants to see and what not).

Obviously a) will complicate all git by a large degree just for the sake of submodules. I am arguing for b), because submodules itself can be seen as a bunch of files which don't interest me as single entities until I want to take a closer look. I think the issue we are discussing here is the price we have to pay for this abstraction. I am very open to proposals how to better handle that but so far I haven't seen any.

I still vote for none. I think the default should be to not have untracked files in your projects (like you should not have warnings when compiling your project). If that is not wanted, just use the configuration options git provides to change it.