Hi Philippe, >From Philippe Blain, Sun 16 Feb 2020 at 23:51:43 (-0500) : > I reported the same bug to the list back in September [1] Meta question: is there an easy way I could have found your bug report? > and I’m glad to say I just finished (today!) a patch series [2] that fixes this bug. Great! Thanks for the patches! > Here you just did ` git commit -am 'Add submodule plam’` so the next command according to your reproducer above would be `git checkout nosubmodules` > > > Migrating git directory of 'plam' from > > '/data/dams/var/tmp/ploum/plam/.git' to > > '/data/dams/var/tmp/ploum/.git/modules/plam' > > Migrating git directory of 'plam/plim' from > > '/data/dams/var/tmp/ploum/plam/plim/.git' to > > '/data/dams/var/tmp/ploum/.git/modules/plam/modules/plim' > > Switched to branch 'nosubmodules' > > Your branch is behind 'master' by 1 commit, and can be fast-forwarded. > > (use "git pull" to update your local branch) > > Here, git is migrating the git directories of both submodules to the git directory of the superproject (ploum). This tells me you probably have the `submodule.recurse` config set somewhere, as this is the behaviour I get I if I do `git checkout --recurse-submodules nosubmodules`. Yes, you are of course right. I should have specified it in my bug report, I tried to specify the setting explicitely in the last checkout but as you noticed I forgot to specify it in all other commands, sorry about the noise. > That’s another hint that you have `submodule.recurse` set. I don’t get this error doing `git reset --hard`, but I get it doing `git reset --hard --recurse-submodules` (or `git reset --hard --r`, which works and is quicker to type!). `git reset` populates the index, so now `git ls-files -s` would now show the correct content of ‘plam’. Oh, I did not know git expand unambiguous long options! By the way the fact that `git reset` also support `--recurse-submodules` is not specified in the man page. (It is in the help text thought). And it would be nice if the documentation of submodule.recurse in git-config specify the list of all affected commands, rather than just "all commands that have a --recurse-submodules options". (I could send a patch for this if there is interest) > > Note that I wasn't able to reproduce in this small examples, but when > > trying to repair I also add some strange errors of the form > > '.git is not a git directory' (where .git was a pseudo symlink > > gitdir: ../.git/modules/plam). -> This is explained by your Patch 5/6 > would have correctly checked out the submodules. I have a git alias ‘no-rs’ (for no recurse-submodules) that I use in these situations: > git config --global alias.no-rs ‘-c submodule.recurse=0’ Can you use alias to define option settings (rather than commands followed by options) without using the 'f() {}' trick? Using your alias, I get fatal: empty alias for no-rs > Then the `submodule update` call above could be shortened to > git no-rs submodule update --recursive --force > Note that using the `submodule.recurse` config also applies to internal calls to git commands (issued by other git commands), so using adding `--no-recurse-submodules` to the command line might not be enough to completely turn off the effect of that config, hence this handy alias. Ohh, good to know! -- Damien Robert http://www.normalesup.org/~robert/pro