Hi Stefan, Thanks for the reply. Is there any known workaround for this situation, so that a manual resolve isn't needed for every single merge in this scenario? Thanks, Benbuck On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 4:05 PM, Stefan Beller <sbeller@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 11:10 PM, Ben Nason <bnason@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> In git if you replace a subdirectory with a submodule in one branch, >> every successive merge from another branch without that change will >> cause a conflict. To reproduce this please see below (DOS batch file). >> >> Is this expected behavior? > > Yes. > > "git submodule update [--init]" only (creates or) updates existing > submodules. It doesn't take care of removing submodules that are > no longer recorded in the tree. > > "git merge" currently also does not touch submodules. (we may have > git merge --recurse-submodules soon, though). So as soon as there > is a conflict between the submodule (or an unrelated repo, who happens > to live inside this other repo), and new directories/files that would appear, > the merge errors out. > > Ideally Git would be smarter than the current behavior. > > Stefan