Hello git devs! I'd like to start off by saying that git is an amazing piece of software and every one of you deserve major kudos for your work on the project. However, I'd like to point out a few "paper cut" bugs (to use the Ubuntu parlance). Apologies if this question has been asked already, but what is the reasoning behind making git clone not recursive (--recursive) by default? I have just recently started splitting my projects into submodules, and I feel like this is a major usability issue, especially for newbies. Wouldn't it be better to have a "--non-recursive" option and clone recursively by default? Similarly, I feel that "git pull" should automatically "git submodule update --recursive --init" as well, with the current behavior able to be specified with a "--non-recursive" option. I feel like these sorts of choices make submodules seem very much like second class citizens in git and make git much less user friendly. I feel that the most common use case that people want is to keep submodules properly in sync. In addition, I feel that power users that really want to make shallow clones, non-recursive clones, etc. could still be served with a simple option. I guess there are problems with changes in submodules being overwritten, so I suppose there would need to be additional warnings or even just refusal to pull into dirty directories, similar to the way git behaves in a regular repository. Thanks for the excellent work, Mara Kim Ph.D. Candidate Computational Biology Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN -- 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