Getting "The following submodule paths contain changes that can not be found on any remote" when they are in the remote

Hi, I'm getting very often, but not always, with many different projects using submodules, the message:

  The following submodule paths contain changes that can
  not be found on any remote:
    <module>

  Please try

  	git push --recurse-submodules=on-demand

  or cd to the path and use

  	git push

  to push them to a remote.

  fatal: Aborting.

This even happens after doing a:

git submodule deinit <module> rm -fr <module> rm -fr .git/modules/<module> git submodule update --init

So I am getting the reference from the remote, but when pushing a new change (that doesn't touch the submodules) I keep getting this error.

I tried to get more information about why this is happening but I couldn't. Googling didn't help either, so I'm resorting to ask here.

I would also like to report a tiny bug, when using push --quiet, I do get all the message above except for the <module> name, which is quite confusing.

$ git --version git version 2.9.3

(running under Ubuntu 14.04)

Please CC me, and thanks a lot in advance!

On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 11:34 AM, Leandro Lucarella <leandro.lucarella@sociomantic.com> wrote:

Check if push.recurseSubmodules is set (in the project, globally, in the home dir?)

    git config --list | grep push.recurseSubmodules

So the submodule did not change, but you still get the error? That sounds like a bug.

Can you provide a sample repository that demonstrates this bug? Maybe there are 'dangling' submodule pointers in past commits that trigger this problem?

If you are sure it is bug and not your fault, you can overwrite the push.recurseSubmodules setting locally in your repository to be "no" or "on-demand", see the git config documentation[1].

[1] e.g. https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-config.html

This sounds like a second bug.

See https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/transport.c#L767

So there are a few issues:

* the printf in the loop should be an fprintf(stderr,...)  for consistency.
* die_with_unpushed_submodules that is called from transport_push
  doesn't respect the transport->verbose setting.

The second bug can be explained with these issues; the first one could hint at a bug in find_unpushed_submodules in submodule.c

Thanks for reporting a bug! Stefan

On Tue, 23 Aug 2016 20:34:46 +0200 Leandro Lucarella <leandro.lucarella@sociomantic.com> wrote:

One more thing, doing a clean new clone seems to work, but I have this issue in many many repos, which are old clones, from before Git had the ability to check for submodules. Could it be some incompatibility in old clones with this? Is there anything I can look for in the .git/ directory or elsewhere to fix them?

Thanks again!

On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 11:38 AM, Leandro Lucarella <leandro.lucarella@sociomantic.com> wrote:

Check if push.recurseSubmodules is set?