From: Eddy Petrișor <eddy.petrisor@xxxxxxxxx> There are projects such as llvm/clang which use several repositories, and they might be forked for providing support for various features such as adding Redox awareness to the toolchain. This typically means the superproject will use another branch than master, occasionally even use an old commit from that non-master branch. Combined with the fact that when incorporating such a hierachy of repositories usually the user is interested in just the exact commit specified in the submodule info, it follows that a desireable usecase is to be also able to provide '--depth 1' or at least have a shallow clone to avoid waiting for ages for the clone operation to finish. In theory, this should be straightforward since the git protocol allows fetching an arbitary commit, but, in practice, some servers do not permit fetch-by-sha1. Git submodule seems to be very stubborn and cloning master, although the wrapper script and the gitmodules-helper could work together to clone directly the branch specified in the .gitmodules file, if specified. Signed-off-by: Eddy Petrișor <eddy.petrisor@xxxxxxxxx> --- git-submodule.sh | 4 +++- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/git-submodule.sh b/git-submodule.sh index 24914963c..65e3af08b 100755 --- a/git-submodule.sh +++ b/git-submodule.sh @@ -589,8 +589,10 @@ cmd_update() branch=$(git submodule--helper remote-branch "$sm_path") if test -z "$nofetch" then + # non-default branch refspec + br_refspec=$(git submodule-helper remote-branch $sm_path) # Fetch remote before determining tracking $sha1 - fetch_in_submodule "$sm_path" $depth || + fetch_in_submodule "$sm_path" $depth $br_refspec || die "$(eval_gettext "Unable to fetch in submodule path '\$sm_path'")" fi remote_name=$(sanitize_submodule_env; cd "$sm_path" && get_default_remote) -- 2.16.2