query on git submodule (ignore)

Hello,

I am new to this community ,so please ignore if I am asking anything silly.

Case : Today when I built my submodule , and did a git status , it shows as modified.

After reading certain suggestions on web i found out that i can ignore that adding a line in .gitmodules

But, I had to add that line manually ( which could be errorprone because of typos )

Question:
    1. Is it feasible to build a feature like :
                   git submodule "zlib" ignore dirty ( which will
ignore submodule zlib when its built and dirty  as it has new files in
its directory)

If this feature is feasible , how do i know if its developed ( awaiting merge ) or can I build the patch ?

Regards, Prashant

On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 7:17 PM, prashant Nidgunde <pashnidgunde@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't recall such a feature, but I'm sure patches to implement something would be welcome to be reviewed! (For more information about submitting patches you could read https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/SubmittingPatches)

I think having an option to automatically write this would be useful. It may already be possible to do something similar via the git config command with the -f file argument to edit the .gitmodules file (as it uses the gitconfig format for its contents). However, this is definitely not intuitive.

You can read the documentation for the commands using "git help submodule" and "git help config". Patches are also definitely welcome for updates to the documentation if it's not clear.

I know also that having a simpler interface to set submodules up so that they are treated as unchanged would be useful as I have projects at $dayjob which use submodules, and this is often a complaint against their use by my co-workers (who sometimes then accidentally commit re-wind updates to the submodules due to inattentiveness with use of git add . or git commit -a).

Thanks, Jake

prashant Nidgunde <pashnidgunde@gmail.com> writes:

[cc: stefan, for his interest in improving 'git submodules']

How does it prevent you from saying 

	git submodule "glib" ignore dirty

when you really meant "zlib"? How is the command supposed to know that you did *not* mean "glib", which may currently not exist in the index nor in the working tree yet but you are about to create, and doing the "ignore dirty" configuration as an earlier step of multiple steps to add a submodule?

I personally doubt that the main issue you should be concerned about is feasibility. A larger issue is how it is supposed to help, iow, is such a "feature" useful in the first place?

Whenever you hear yourself say "I have to do X manually, and I can make mistakes. Can a command do it instead?", you have to ask yourself: what pieces of information do you give to that command, and how do you ensure you do not make typos on that command line?

Besides, the above syntax would not work. What would a user do when a submodule called "add" exists, for example?

On Sun, Mar 25, 2018 at 9:46 AM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

silly.

modified.

I would think this can be solved by reordering the command to be

   git submodule ignore [--option-for-granularity=dirty] [-- <path-spec>]

However for now this would be a shallow wrapper to

   name=$(git submodule--helper name <one submodule path>)
   git config submodule.$name.ignore dirty

if I understand the requested feature correctly? Instead of coming up with each name for each submodule path (btw name and path are most often the same any way, just put it here for correctness), one could also use

   git submodule foreach -- \
       git -C .. config submodule.$name.ignore dirty

as the foreach already populates the $name variable.

Stefan