Re: [PATCH v2 0/3] Teach fetch and pull to recursively fetch submodules too

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 5, 2010, 21:06 UTC
Message-ID: <7vhbh05oz2.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <4CAB8DDF.8080004@web.de>

Jens Lehmann <Jens.Lehmann@web.de> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

>    a) "git fetch --all"
>
>       The user wanted to fetch new commits from all remotes. I think
>       git should also fetch all submodules then, no matter if new
>       commits from them are fetched in the superproject, as the user
>       explicitly said he wants everything. Objections?

Why? I do not see a "--submodules" option on that command line. The only thing I asked is to grab all branches for the project I ran "git fetch" in.

Show 9 quoted lines

>    b) "git fetch [<repository>]"
>
>       The user wants to fetch from the default [or a single repo]. I
>       think all submodules should be fetched too, Kevin thinks this
>       should happen only when it is necessary (at least for his 'H'
>       repository). While I think fetching all submodules too is
>       consistent with the fact that you get all branches in the
>       superproject too, whether you need them or not, we can't seem
>       to agree on this one (also see my proposal below).

The case with <repository> is a lot more questionable than the case of fetching implicitly from whereever you usually fetch from. Imagine that you fork git.git, and create a separate project that has some nifty additions to support submodules better. The additional part is naturally done as a submodule. This jens.git repository becomes very popular and people clone from it. Your users usually interact with your repository by saying "git fetch" or "git pull" without any explicit <repository>. They, however, would want to fetch/pull from me from time to time to get updates that you haven't incorporated in jens.git repository. "git fetch junio" is run. Why should such a "fetch" go to your repository and slurp the objects for the submodules?

Perhaps you would want some knobs like these?

        [remote "origin"]
                fetch-submodules = all
                fetch-submodules = changed

        [remote "junio"]
                fetch-submodules = none

I dunno. I've never been a fan of automatically recursing into submodules (iow, treating the nested structure as if there is no nesting), so...