On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 1:08 AM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I think I misread this the first time. I got distracted by your > mention of the --remote option, but you mentioned you want to use the > SHA-1 of the submodule listed, so that was silly of me. > > I think you'll find that "git fetch --no-recurse-submodules" and "git > submodule update" do exactly what you want. "git submodule update" > does perform a fetch (unless you pass --no-fetch). > > Let me know how it goes. :) > > I'd still be interested in hearing more about the nature of the > submodules involved --- maybe `submodule.fetchJobs` would help, or > maybe this is a workflow where a tool that transparently fetches > submodules on demand like > https://gerrit.googlesource.com/gitfs/+/master/docs/design.md would be > useful (I'm not recommending using slothfs for this today, since it's > read-only, but it illustrates the idea). Hi thanks for your response, sorry I am a bit late getting back with you. Maybe my workflow is dated, because I'm still used to treating submodules as distinctly separated and independent things. I realize submodule recursion is becoming more inherent in many high level git commands, but outside of git there are separation issues that make this workflow doomed to be non-seamless. For example, pull requests will never offer the same uniformity: You will still have 1 pull request per submodule. There's also the issue of log audits: You cannot use blame, log, bisect, or other "diagnostic" commands to introspect into submodules "as if" they were subtree or something of the like (i.e. truly part of the DAG). A more realistic example of one of the common questions I still can't answer easily is: "How do you determine which commit in a submodule made it into which release of the software?" In the case where the parent repository has the annotated tags (representing software release milestones), and the submodule is just a common library (which does not have those tags and has no release cycle). Anyway, none of these issues are particularly related but they do contribute to the answer to your question regarding my workflow and use cases. The list goes on but I hope you get the idea. Some of the more functional issues are performance related: I am aware enough, at times, that I can save time (in both local operations and network overhead) by skipping submodules. For example, if I know that I'm merging mainline branches, I do not need to mess with the submodules (I can fetch, merge, commit, push from the parent repo without messing with the submodules. This saves me time). If `fetchJobs` was also `updateJobs`, i.e. you could update submodules in parallel too, that might make this less of an issue. Think of repositories [like boost][1] that have (I think) over a hundred sibling submodules: Fetching 8 in parallel *and* doing `submodule update` in parallel 8 times might also speed things up. There's also `git status`, that if it recurses into submodules, is also significantly slow in the boost case (I'm not sure if it is parallelized). Again, none of this is particularly related, but just to give you more context on the "why" for my ask. Sorry if I'm dragging this out too far. The TLDR is that I do prefer the manual control. Automatic would be great if submodules were treated as integrated in a similar manner to subtree, but it's not there. I wasn't aware that `submodule update` did a fetch, because sometimes if I do that, I get errors saying SHA1 is not present (because the submodule did not get fetched). Granted I haven't seen this in a while, so maybe the fetch on submodule update is a newer feature. Do you know what triggers the fetch on update without --remote? Is it the missing SHA1 that triggers it, or is it fetching unconditionally? Thanks for confirming it behaves as I already wanted. And as you can tell, I'm also happy to further discuss motivation / use cases / details related to overall usage of submodules if you'd like. I'm happy to help however I can! [1]: https://github.com/boostorg/boost
