Proposal: When switching branches, merging or resetting the work tree of populated submodules should be checked out too according to the commit recorded in the superproject. Make this the default for porcelain and optional for plumbing. The same safety precautions that are used for files in the superproject apply to the changes present in the submodules, no local modifications may be overwritten unless -f is used. When the "update" config option is set to "merge" or "rebase" the submodule will be left unchanged. The "update" config option will learn a new value "none" to let the user turn off this behavior for single submodules. A global config option and the command line parameter "--recurse-submodules" will also be added. This change will remove the need to call "git submodule update" for all populated submodules (except those who use the "update=merge" or "update=rebase" configuration settings). Advantages: * This makes submodules behave like the files in the superproject. Every time the work tree of the superproject changes, the work trees of the populated submodules are updated accordingly. * This is the least surprising behavior for new submodule users. Risks: The commands might run longer, for those users who use submodules to gain performance by putting large and/or many files into submodules this may be unacceptable. Also people might be surprised by submodule work trees changing without explicitly invoking "git submodule update". These commands will now fail in the presence of changed submodules where they would have succeeded before. Migration plan: Announce the change in behavior and document how to easily configure the old behavior when needed and enable this functionality in 1.8.0. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html