Hi Junio
If iterating over only active ones is useful, surely it would also
be useful to be able to iterate over only inactive ones, right?
So, before getting married too much to the use-case of "only active
ones" and getting our eyes clouded from seeing a larger picture,
let's see what other "traits" of submodules we can use to pick which
ones to act on.
Are there attributes other than "is-active" that we may want to and
can check about submodules? There is is_submodule_populated() next
to is_submodule_active(), which might be a candidate. IOW, what I am
wondering is if it makes sense to extend this to
git submodule foreach --trait=is-active ...
git submodule foreach --trait=!is-active ...
git submodule foreach --trait=is-populated ...
to allow iterating only on submodules with/without given trait (I am
not suggesting the actual option name, but merely making sure that
'is-active' is not anything special but one of the possibilities
that can be used to limit the iteration using the same mechanism).
The idea that other candidate are possible seem good. But then users
will need combination like is-active && !is-populated. We will end up
implementing a complex code to filter based on expression which is IMHO
overkill.
If is-populated is needed, that could be implemented this way:
git submodule--helper --is-populated[=true|false]
this would allow combination with the is active filter and the
previous example would be
git submodule--helper --is-active --is-populated=false <cmd>
Regards,
GG
