Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: >> And in my current understanding of submodules the check in >> .gitmodules ought to be enough, too. > > Yeah, that probably makes sense. You can have a gitlink without a > .gitmodules file, but I don't quite know what that would mean in terms > of submodules (I guess it's not a submodule but "something else"). That may be a lot better than reading the index unconditionally, but I'd rather not to see "git rev-parse" read ".gitmodules" at all. It would discourage scripted use of Git for no good reason.