Hi, Stefan Beller wrote: > On Tue, Aug 15, 2017 at 5:11 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Stefan Beller <sbeller@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: >>> Junio C Hamano wrote: >>>> Is "is it populated" a good thing to check here, though? IIRC, >>>> add-submodule-odb allows you to add the object database of an >>>> inactivated submodule, so this seems to change the behaviour. I do >>>> not know if the behaviour change is a good thing (i.e. bugfix) or >>>> not (i.e. regression) offhand, though. >>> >>> Good point, we should be able to push non-populated, even inactive(?) >>> submodules. For that we strictly need add_submodule_odb here >>> (or the repo object of the submodule, eventually). >>> >>> So let's retract this patch for now. >> >> Not so fast. > > Ok, I took another look at the code. > > While we may desire that un-populated submodules can be pushed > (due to checking out another revision where the submodule > doesn't exist, before pushing), this is not supported currently, because > the call to run the push in the submodule assumes there is a > "<path>/.git" on which the child process can operate. > So for now we HAVE to have the submodule populated. It was not immediately obvious to me that this is just "for now". I would be really confused if I had deactivated a submodule and "git push --recurse-submodules" pushed from it anyway. If the submodule is active but not populated, then the question becomes "Why wasn't it populated?" If this is a bare repository, then nothing is populated, and pushing from an active-but-unpopulated submodule sounds like a plausible wish. But in a non-bare repository, I'm having trouble imagining the use case that brings this situation about. And where people have been needing this so far has been non-bare repositories. In that context, the check "is active and populated" does not seem unusual or provisional. Are you hinting that replacing the check with "is active" would make it work well in bare repositories? I think I agree, though you'd have to be careful about the case where the submodule is active but hasn't been fetched to $GIT_DIR/modules yet. Thanks, Jonathan
