Re: Re: [RFC v2] submodule: Respect requested branch on all clones

From: Francesco Pretto <ceztko@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 8, 2014, 23:07 UTC
Message-ID: <CALas-iheQ4Rfxvty5guEieVwa8SffRnhRdHkNXUKwmuHRXD2Xg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20140108010504.GE26583@odin.tremily.us>

2014/1/8 W. Trevor King <wking@tremily.us>:

Show 14 quoted lines

> To elaborate the idea I sketched out here [2], say
> you want:
>
>   Superproject branch  Submodule branch  Upstream branch
>   ===================  ================  ===============
>   master               master            master
>   super-feature        master            master
>   my-feature           my-feature        master
>   other-feature        other-feature     other-feature
>
> That's only going to work with per-superproject-branch configs for
> both the local and remote branches.  Using the same name for both
> local and remote branches does not work.
>

After long thoughts, I think your idea about a local branch with a differently named remote branch looks interesting but I would be extremely cautious to add a ' submodule.<name>.local-branch' now. Do we have a similar mechanism on regular repository clones? We can clone and switch to a branch other than "master" by default, but can we also have a different remote by default? If we don't have it, we shouldn't add it first on submodules, as there's the chance the feature never get coupled on the regular clones.

Also, I think you fear too much that this can't be added also later.

I think you should pursue your initial proposal of "--branch means attached" to get it upstream first. It's alone, IMO, a great improvement on submodules.