Re: [RFC PATCH 2/3] grep: prepare grep for submodules

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 6:28 AM, Chris Packham <judge.packham@gmail.com> wrote:

I haven't followed the recursive submodule support in Git lately. But I think --submodule-prefix is unnecessary. I would imagine you need to add --submodule-prefix to a lot more commands as they support recusive submodule search. There is a corner case in Git's prefix setup that we can utilize to avoid the new option.

If you do this at the superproject repo:

$ GIT_DIR=path/to/submodule/.git GIT_WORK_TREE=path/to/submodule git grep blah

I would expect that it shows the result correctly (i.e. all files prefixed by "path/to/submodule"), but it does not right now. If you make that setup work, then you don't need --submodule-prefix, just set GIT_DIR/GIT_WORK_TREE properly and run "git grep".

You can make setup_explicit_git_dir() realize that situation (current working directory outside $GIT_WORK_TREE), then calculate and save the submodule prefix in startup_info struct. Then "git grep" or any commands can just read startup_info to find out the submodule prefix.