git commit vs. ignore-submodules

Hello.

As this is my first post to this list, let me first thank all the people involved in Git development - it's really a great tool.

Now to the point. Since Git 1.8 (I think), git commit command honours the submodules' ignore settings, configured either in .gitmodules, or in .git/config. That's very nice and certainly correct for "git commit -a", but it's less clear if one explicitely stages an updated submodule using git add. Git commit will ignore it anyway, if ignore=all is configured in .gitmodules. Maybe that's correct too, I'm not sure about that, but it's inconvenient in our use case, especially combined with the lack of --ignore-submodule parameter to git commit, as git status and git diff have.

We use submodules in such a way that normally we don't ever want to see changes in them in output of git diff and git status. So we set ignore=all in .gitmodules for each submodule. But occasionally, we need to add a new submodule, and sometimes also commit changed submodule. This got harder with Git 1.8, we have to "git config submodule.<name>.ignore none" before the commit, and "git config --unset ..." after.

I'd like to at least add an --ignore-submodules parameter to git commit. I though about posting a patch, but as I looked into the commit source file, I didn't see any straightforward way to implement it. I don't have enough free time for a deeper analysis of the sources, I'm sorry.

So please, let me first know, whether you could possibly accept such patch, and if so, then I'd really appreciate some hints on how to do it.

And also, I'd like to know git folks' opinion on whether it's OK that git commit with ignore=all in .gitmodules ignores submodules even when they are explicitely staged with git add.

Thanks in advance for any reply, Ronald Weiss