git submodule merge madness

Hi,

We've (again) replaced a few directories with submodules. Man, it's madness!

The typical problem is that we get an error trying to merge a "pre- submodule" branch into master:

	fatal: cannot read object 894c77319a18c4d48119c2985a9275c9f5883584  
'some/sub/dir': It is a submodule!
Mark Levedahl wrote an example in July, but I don't think he got any  
replies:  http://marc.info/?l=git&m=121587851313303
Any ideas?   Is there something we can do?    I see a strong  
correlation between adding a new submodule and the number of "git  
sucks" messages on our internal IRC server.

  - ask