I was working with a fresh clone of a repository where I'd forgotten
that one of the directories was setup as a submodule, so I hadn't
initialized it.
I tried to add a symlink to a location outside the repository and this
failed with an assertion (exact text in comment below). When looking
into that I realized that the directory was meant to be a submodule and
decided to try to change that. So I tried to remove the submodule, and
got an error (misleadingly) saying that couldn't be done because it uses
a .git directory.
I first noticed this with git 2.9.3 from Debian unstable, but I also see
it building from v2.10.1-502-g6598894 fetched from master recently.
The following script replicates both of these issues. These could both
be classified as "don't do that", although at lease the assertion is
quite ugly.
--- >8 ----
#!/bin/sh -e
directory=$(mktemp -d)
echo "Using directory '$directory'"
cd $directory
git init --quiet orig
(
cd orig
# Using a random, small repository for the submodule.
git submodule --quiet add https://github.com/diepm/vim-rest-console.git sub
git commit -m init >/dev/null
)
git clone --quiet orig dup
cd dup
(
cd sub
ln -s /tmp/dont_care
# Next command aborts with
# git: pathspec.c:317: prefix_pathspec: Assertion `item->nowildcard_len <= item->len && item->prefix <= item->len' failed.`
git add . || : expected to fail
)
rm -f .git/index.lock
# Next command fails with error wrongly saying that the submodule uses a .git
# directory. I believe that the real problem is that the uninitialized
# submodule has content.
git rm sub