I thought getting rid of the extra `prefix` argument in submodule helper functions was easy up to the point of all but one test passing in the test suite. It turned out the implementation of that prefix patch was wrong, only caught by tests, so we want to add tests for subtle details with submodule sync and update which have not been tests yet. For the record, I thought the 'prefix' patch was as easy as: - git submodule--helper list --prefix "$wt_prefix" "$@" | { + git -C "$wt_prefix" submodule--helper list "$@" | { for all occurrences of `submodule--helper list`. This is not the case as by doing so the recursive functionality of submodules is broken in some edge cases. Consider this sequence: mkdir untracked && cd untracked && git submodule <command> --recursive The operation is run from within the work tree, so fro a normal submodule operation (without --recursive) you expect the pathes to be adapted to be prefixed by a `../` to make sense relative to the untracked directory. In the case of recursive submodule operations, currently `git submodule` usually does if test -n "$recursive" then ( prefix="$prefix$sm_path/" clear_local_git_env cd "$sm_path" && eval cmd_update ) By having a change of directory followed by the recursive call to the operation we need to make sure the displayed path is still correctly referenced to where the operation started. By passing the prefix separately to git submodule--helper, this works currently as the prefix is only used for calculating the displaypath. If it were passed by the standard Git machinery, there is going on more, which fails us at some point. I think we may need to enable Git to pass in 'negative' pathes for the prefix, i.e. Although operating on this repository, your reference for displaying paths should be '../untracked' for the example above, when the submodule is in the root directory of the superproject. This seems currently not possible with the standard way to pass down the prefix. TL;DR: Most of the test is unrelated to the patch series, the patch series adds some tests, which I would have found useful to stop me going the wrong direction. Thanks, Stefan Stefan Beller (2): Check recursive submodule update to have correct path from subdirectory submodule sync: Test we can pass individual submodules t/t7403-submodule-sync.sh | 13 +++++++++---- t/t7406-submodule-update.sh | 12 ++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 21 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) -- 2.7.2.368.g934fe14 -- 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