Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Mara Kim <mara.kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> Apologies if this question has been asked already, but what is the >> reasoning behind making git clone not recursive (--recursive) by >> default? > > The primary reason why submodules are separate repositories is not > to require people to have everything. Some people want recursive, > some others don't, and the world is not always "majority wins" (not > that I am saying that majority will want recursive). > > Inertia, aka backward compatibility and not surprising existing > users, plays some role when deciding the default. > > Also, going --recursive when the user did not want is a lot more > expensive mistake to fix than not being --recursive when the user > wanted to. Having said all that, I do not mean to say that I am opposed to introduce some mechanism to let the users express their preference between recursive and non-recursive better, so that "git clone" without an explicit --recursive (or --no-recursive) can work to their taste. A configuration in $HOME/.gitconfig might be a place to start, even though that has the downside of assuming that the given user would want to use the same settings for all his projects, which may not be the case in practice. -- 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