On 01/30, Benjamin Schindler wrote: > Hi > > Consider the following usecase: I have the master branch where I > have a submodule A. I create a branch where I rename the submodule > to be in the directory B. After doing all of this, everything looks > good. > Now, I switch back to master. The first oddity is, that it fails to > remove the folder B because there are still files in there: > > bschindler@metis ~/Projects/submodule_test (testbranch) $ git > checkout master > warning: unable to rmdir other_submodule: Directory not empty > Switched to branch 'master' > > Git submodule deinit on B fails because the submodule is not known > to git anymore (after all, the folder B exists only in the other > branch). I can easily just remove the folder B from disk and > initialize the submodule A again, so all seems good. > > However, what is not good is that the submodule b is still known in > .git/config. This is in particular a problem for us, because I know > a number of tools which use git config to retrieve the submodule > list. Is it therefore a bug that upon branch switch, the submodule > gets deregistered, but its entry in .git/config remains? > > thanks a lot > Benjamin Schindler > > P.s. I did not subscribe to the mailing list, please add me at least > do CC. Thanks
submodules and checkout don't really play nicely with each other at the moment. Stefan (cc'd) is currently working on a patch series to improve the behavior of checkout with submodules. Currently, if you want to ensure you have a good working state after a checkout you should run `git submodule update` to update all of the submoules. As far as your submodule still being listed in the config, that should be expected given the scenario you described. If I'm understanding you correctly, A and B are both the same submodule just renamed on a different branch. The moment you add a submoule to a repository it is given a name which is fixed. Typically this is the path from the root of the repository. The thing is, since you are able to freely move a submodule, its path can change. To account for this there is the .gitmodules file which allows you to do a lookup from submodule name to the path at which it exists (or vice versa). The submodules that are stored in .git/config are those which are 'initialize' or rather the submodules in which you are interested in and will be updated by `git submodule update`. So given your scenario you should only have a single submodule in .git/config and the .gitmodules file should have a single entry with a differing path for each branch. Hopefully this gives you a bit more information to work with. Since Stefan has been working with this more recently than me he may have some more input. -- Brandon Williams
