Re: [RFC] submodule+shallow clone feature request

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 10, 2010, 22:14 UTC
Message-ID: <7vsk983fi4.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <4B73277C.9010801@columbia.edu>

Schuyler Duveen <sky@columbia.edu> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> My use case is deploying from a git repository, which would be even more
> graceful with the following features:
>
> 1. When 'git clone' has both --recursive and --depth, then submodules
> are also checked out shallow (for speed/bandwidth).
>
> 2. Some way to specify an override on .gitmodules sources.  This is
> because our .gitmodules includes public, read-only sources (github),
> rather than our local repos we would prefer to deploy from (for the
> purpose of reliability).

These should be doable if you do not use --recursive, so I don't think they are insurmountable issues. I suspect many people would welcome such enhancements to the "git submodule" potty.

I think the current implementation of "--recursive" is an attempt to help people with a particular view (all submodules are interesting and the user needs an access to them immediately) while not trying to help others with different needs. Contribution from the latter class of users to change the situation would be good.