Hi all, I have encountered some difficulties with the new location of the metainformation directory (GIT_DIR) of submodules.
The change of location happened in 1.7.8: * When populating a new submodule directory with "git submodule init", the $GIT_DIR metainformation directory for submodules is created inside $GIT_DIR/modules/<name>/ directory of the superproject and referenced via the gitfile mechanism. This is to make it possible to switch between commits in the superproject that has and does not have the submodule in the tree without re-cloning. Which problems it causes: 1) You cannot move submodule easily (change the path to submodule). You can either remove the submodule and then add it again to different path, or move the submodule directory and then edit path in its .git, change path in superproject's .git/modules dir and in .git/config. This is quite difficult in comparisson with previous behaviour when you can just move the submodule and then stash changes. 2) This change introduced many difficulties on Windows platform, because there is limitation to path length and the way how paths are now composed leads to strange errors when project with submodules is in user's dir. 3) Submodules became dependent on superproject. This is quite bad if you are using submodules a lot (e.g. versioning the whole working space), because you cannot move or copy them out of the superproject now. I honestly don't know why this change was introduced because I have never seen git removing any submodule while walking through the history. I have seen only the message saying that directory is not empty and so git will not remove it. Or is there another reason why this change was added to git? Thanks Cheers Daniel -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
