On May 8, 2017 12:55 PM, Stefan Beller wrote: >On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 9:46 AM, Randall S. Becker <rsbecker@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On May 8, 2017 12:25 PM, Stefan Beller wrote: >>>On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 7:42 AM, Randall S. Becker <rsbecker@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>>> On May 6, 2017 4:38 AM Ciro Santilli wrote: >>>>> This is a must if you are working with submodules, otherwise every >>>>> git checkout requires a git submodule update, and you forget it, >>>>> and things break, and you understand, and you go to stack overflow >>>>> questions >>>>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22328053/why-doesnt-git-checkout >>>>> -a utomatically-do-git-submodule-update-recursive >>>>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4611512/is-there-a-way-to-make-g >>>>> it -pull-automatically-update-submodules >>>>> and you give up and create aliases :-) >> >>> The upcoming release (2.13) will have "git checkout >>> --recurse-submodules", which will checkout the submodules at the commit as recorded in the superproject. >>> I plan to add an option "submodule.recurse" (name is subject to >>> bikeshedding), which would make the --recurse-submodules flag given >>> by default for all commands that support the flag. (Currently cooking we have reset --recurse-submodules, already existing there is push/pull). >> >> Brilliant! 😊 >> >>>> I rather like the concept of supporting --recurse-submodules. The complexity is that the branches in all submodules all have to have compatible >>>semantics when doing the checkout, which is by no means guaranteed. In the scenario where you are including a submodule from a third-party (very >>>common - see gnulib), the branches likely won't be there, so you have a high probability of having the command fail or produce the same results as >>>currently exists if you allow the checkout even with problems (another option?). If you have control of everything, then this makes sense. >> >>>I am trying to give the use case of having control over everything (or rather mixed) more thought as well, e.g. "checkout --recurse-submodules -b >><name>" may want to create the branches in a subset of submodules as well. >> >> I have to admit that I just assumed it would have to work that way >> this would not be particularly useful. However, in thinking about it, >> we might want to limit the depth of how far -b <name> takes effect. If >> the super module brings in submodules entirely within control of the >> development group, having -b <name> apply down to leaf submodules >> makes sense (in some policies). However, if some submodules span out >> to, say, gnulib, that might not make particular sense. Some downward >> limit might be appropriate. Perhaps, in the submodule ref, you might >> want to qualify it as <commit>:<ref> (but the impact of that is >> probably and admittedly pretty horrid). I hesitate to suggest a >> numeric limit, as that assumes that submodules are organized in a >> balanced tree - which is axiomatically unreasonable. Maybe something >> in .git/config, like >> >> [branch "topic*"] >> submodules=a,b,c >> >> But I suspect that would make things even more confusing. >I thought about having yet-another-flag in the .gitmodules file, which states if the submodule is extern or internal. >[submodule "gnulib"] > path=./gnulib > external = true # implies no branch for checkout -b --recurse-submodules >I think there are a couple more situations where such "external" submodules are treated differently, so maybe we'd want to think carefully about the >actual name as different workflows would want to have different features for an internal/external submodule. I didn't want to open up that one, but yes. That makes sense. However, I don't like overloading what "external" means or might mean in the future. Would you consider a distinct Boolean for that, like inherit-branch=true? Cheers, Randall