How to properly rename a repository with submodules

Gelonida N· May 20, 2012, 18:19 UTC · lore

Hi,

Today I noticed to my surprise, that a repository with submodules contains absolute paths.in the .git file of each sub module.

This is kind of surprising to me and seems to make it absolutely impossible to have a non bare git repository on a memory stick.

It also seems to make it impossible to rename a working repository after cloning.

So I have three questions.

1.) Is there any way to force git to use relative path names, such, that this issue just disappears.

2,) Is there any existing script, that allows me to move a git repository to another location without breaking it's sub modules.

3.) Why do these path names have to be absolute? Is this for performance reasons? path names relative to the location of the .git file seem to be much more flexible / portable.

Thanks in advance for your answers

Gelonida N· May 20, 2012, 18:49 UTC · re: Gelonida N · lore

Re: How to properly rename a repository with submodules

On 05/20/2012 08:19 PM, Gelonida N wrote:

Show 23 quoted lines

> Hi,
>
> Today I noticed to my surprise, that a repository with submodules
> contains absolute paths.in the .git file of each sub module.
>
> This is kind of surprising to me and seems to make it absolutely
> impossible to have a non bare git repository on a memory stick.
>
> It also seems to make it impossible to rename a working repository after
> cloning.
>
> So I have three questions.
>
> 1.) Is there any way to force git to use relative path names, such, that
> this issue just disappears.
>
> 2,) Is there any existing script, that allows me to move a git
> repository to another location without breaking it's sub modules.
>
> 3.) Why do these path names have to be absolute? Is this for performance
> reasons? path names relative to the location of the .git file seem to be
> much more flexible / portable.
>

It seems this behaviur is just on one of my 'new' machines which was upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 (git version 1.7.9.5)

on my old machines I had either really old git versions or the most recent ones 1.7.10

I just added ppa:git-core/ppa to the Ubuntu sources and upgraded git to 1.7.10

Problem solved!! Path names are now relative. So it seems it wasn't only me thinking absolute path names are a bad idea :-)