Re: [PATCH v3 2/3] Add the 'fetch.recurseSubmodules' config setting

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Nov 11, 2010, 18:31 UTC
Message-ID: <7v1v6rhfut.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20101111082748.GA15525@burratino>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

>> "fetch.recurseSubmodules" is only read from .git/config. The one read
>> first from .gitmodules and then from .git/config is the per-submodule
>> setting "submodule.<name>.fetchRecurseSubmodules" added in 3/3.
>
> Sorry for the nonsense.  Would it be easy (or desirable) to make
> _that_ one not be read from .gitmodules?

I think the motivation behind having a way to read it from .gitmodules is so that project can suggest the default for convenience (e.g. "almost everybody who interacts with this project wants these submodules checked out and kept updated").

Traditionally the suggestions kept in .gitmodules were propagated to the config when the submodule was initialized, and at runtime we read only from the config from then on without reading from .gitmodules, so that once the user decides to follow what the project suggests (or customize that away), the preference would stick to the repository.

That arrangement does not cater well to people who want to follow along whatever the project's suggestion of the day, so we might want to change things so that we if we find it in the config, we stop there and use what we found, otherwise we use what is in the in-tree gitmodules; I suspect we might require some changes to "submodule init" not to copy certain things to the config for that to work, though...