Hello, I am trying to prevent git clone --recurse-submodules from installing some of the submodules of the repo that are not necessary to most users. Here is what I did: In my main-project git submodule add --name one url1 git submodule add --name two url2 Then I edited .gitmodules as follows [submodule "one"] active = false url = url1 [submodule "two"] active = true url = url2 commited and pushed. >From a fresh folder when I run git clone --recurse-submodules main-repo-url both "one" and "two" get installed Likewise if I do git clone main-repo-url git submodule init both "one" and "two" are installed and appear in .git/config as well as .git/modules/ >From reading https://git-scm.com/docs/gitsubmodules/2.25.0 my understanding was that both procedures should have installed only "two" and that I should have needed to do git submodule init one in order to force the local installation of the inactive module "one". Either I misunderstood the manual or there is a bug with git submodule init I am using git version 2.17.1 on Ubuntu 18.04 If this is not a bug but an error on my side, I would really appreciate some explanation about the active=false flag so I can achieve my purpose. Faithfully yours, Timur
