Re: [PATCH 2/3] Teach read_tree_recursive() how to traverse into submodules

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jan 18, 2009, 21:55 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0901182244310.3586@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>
In-Reply-To: <8c5c35580901181331v5e54f82fxc6a042962ff1cd06@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

On Sun, 18 Jan 2009, Lars Hjemli wrote:

> So, would you rather have something like `git archive --submodules=foo 
> --submodules=bar HEAD` to explicitly tell which submodule paths to 
> include in the archive when executed in a bare repo?

That does not quite say what you tried to do, does it? You tried to traverse submodules whose commit can be found in the object database.

Setting aside the fact that we usually try to avoid accessing unreachable objects, which your handling does not do, our "git submodule" does not do that either; it only handles submodules that are checked out.

Now, this behavior might be wanted, in bare as well as in non-bare repositories, but I think it should be triggered by an option, such as "--submodules=look-in-superprojects-odb".

I know, I know, the naming is horrible, but I find it just wrong to introduce a behavior that would only confuse users because it introduces inconsistent behavior. As it is, we see too many confused users in #git already with consistent behavior [*1*].

Ciao, Dscho

[*1*] Maybe we should allow cloning empty repositories (with no default branch at all), disable pushing into checked out branches by default, and make "git add empty-dir/" add a .gitignore and add that -- to squash at least half of the questions inside #git so that we can go back to fooling around there.