RE: fatal: could not reset submodule index

On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 18:19, Antoine W. Campagna wrote:

Newlines got mangled, making my message hard to read. Sorry.

Here is the corrected reproduction instructions:

# Create a repository mkdir main cd main git init touch main.txt git add main.txt git commit -a -m "Initial commit" cd ..

# Create a second repository mkdir sub cd sub git init touch sub.txt git add sub.txt git commit -a -m "Initial commit of repo sub" cd ..

# Add the second repository as submodule, on a separate branch cd main git branch with-submodule git checkout with-submodule git submodule add ../sub sub git commit -a -m "Add submodule"

# Set main repo back to master branch (without the submodule) git checkout master cd ..

# Make a clone and checkout the branch git clone main clone1 cd clone1 git checkout with-submodule # Submodule is not automatically updated (sub folder is empty) git submodule update --init --recursive # Now the submodule content is there # But I want to automatically update submodules when checking out a branch cd ..

# Trying again, adding --recursive during clone git clone --recursive main clone2 cd clone2 git checkout with-submodule # Submodule is still not automatically updated (sub folder is empty) git submodule update --init --recursive cd ..

# Trying again, adding --recurse-submodules during checkout git clone --recursive main clone3 cd clone3 git checkout --recurse-submodules with-submodule # Fails with these error messages : # fatal: not a git repository: ../.git/modules/sub # fatal: could not reset submodule index # It seems like Git tries to update the submodule but without having initialized the submodule cd ..

# Trying again with submodule.recurse git config --global submodule.recurse true git clone main clone4 cd clone4 git checkout with-submodule # Submodule is still not automatically updated (sub folder is empty) # It seems like submodule.recurse does not affect git clone

# Trying again with both submodule.recurse and --recursive git config --global submodule.recurse true git clone --recursive main clone5 cd clone5 git checkout with-submodule # Fails with these error messages : # fatal: not a git repository: ../.git/modules/sub # fatal: could not reset submodule index # Same issue as with "git checkout --recurse-submodules"

That is true; submodule.recurse is not affecting git clone. This was a design decision once it was introduced, as the git clone might be too large. Maybe we need to revisit that decision and just clone the submodules if submodule.recurse is set.

The problem that this bug report highlights, is the following: Each branch has its own .gitmodules file and they can be all different, however at clone time we only clone submodules from the currently active branch.

So you could get your test case to pass with
    git clone --branch with-submodule main clone5

Thank you for your input Stefan.

But here is our situation : 7 different projects in separate repositories Big parts of the code is similar between the projects We want to extract these similar portions in separate repositories and add them as submodules (maybe about 10 of them). We would do this progressively, adding one submodule at a time. We need to support older versions so we have to keep branches that will not have submodules. Since we need to checkout these branches regularly, we would want to have submodule.recurse enabled. With this setup, every time a submodule is added in one of the projects, each developer would get the "fatal: could not reset submodule index" error and would be unable to checkout master branch.