Robert Dailey wrote: > 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 this and the rest of the context you sent. It's very helpful. The relevant code in git-submodule.sh is # Run fetch only if $sha1 isn't present or it # is not reachable from a ref. is_tip_reachable "$sm_path" "$sha1" || fetch_in_submodule "$sm_path" $depth || say "$(eval_gettext "Unable to fetch in submodule path '\$displaypath'")" # Now we tried the usual fetch, but $sha1 may # not be reachable from any of the refs is_tip_reachable "$sm_path" "$sha1" || fetch_in_submodule "$sm_path" $depth "$sha1" || die "$(eval_gettext "Fetched in submodule path '\$displaypath', but it did not contain \$sha1. Direct fetching of that commit failed.")" The fallback to fetching by SHA-1 was introduced in v2.8.0-rc0~9^2 (submodule: try harder to fetch needed sha1 by direct fetching sha1, 2018-02-23). Jonathan
