Re: Selectively clone Git submodules -- a useful feature?

From: Jens Lehmann <jens.lehmann@web.de>
Date: Jun 19, 2015, 19:08 UTC
Message-ID: <558468B2.2010307@web.de>
In-Reply-To: <162A5ADF-1FDD-432B-B5F8-672DF5B50EEC@gmail.com>

Am 18.06.2015 um 22:55 schrieb Lars Schneider:

Show 9 quoted lines

> AFAIK Git has two ways to clone a repository with respect to submodules:
>
> (1) Plain clone of just the repository itself:
> git clone git://github.com/foo/bar.git
>
> (2) Recursive clone of the repository including all its submodules:
> git clone --recursive git://github.com/foo/bar.git
>
> I am working on a big cross platform project and on certain platforms I don't

 > need certain submodules. AFAIK there is no way to selectively clone only a
 > subset of the submodules with the standard command line interface. I wonder

> if something like an exclude pattern for submodules would be of general interest.

 > I imagine a call like this after a plain "clone" operation:

>
> git submodule update --init --recursive --exclude 3rdParty/Windows/*

Git already supports that use case: Just set the "submodule.<name>.update" configuration to "none" for all submodules you aren't interested in and "git submodule update" will always skip them.

You can also set this config option globally:

git config --global submodule.<name>.update=none

That'll set the default for all repositories of the logged in user on this computer to not update submodule <name>.

> or even:
>
> git clone --recursive --exclude 3rdParty/Windows/* git://github.com/foo/bar.git

git clone will be influenced by the global setting. If you just want to skip submodule <name> for a single clone you can do it like this:

   git -c submodule.<name>.update=none clone --recursive git://github.com/foo/bar.git