On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 12:10 PM, John Smith <johsmi9...@inbox.com> wrote:
> I found that I use submodules much, much more often in my git projects than I 
> used externals
> in Subversion and the reason is that git encourages/forces to organize large 
> projects into
> smaller repositories, one reason for this being that subversion allows to 
> check out parts of
> a repository while git does not.
>
> But when I clone a git repository with subprojects, I (and everyone else) has 
> to remember to
> add the --recursive option. When switching between branches with different 
> versions/commits of the
> submodules everyone has to remember to update the submodules. When updating a 
> submodule
> everyone has to remember to recurse there too.

The config option fetch.recurseSubmodules exists. It's not quite the
same as what git clone --recurse-submodules does but it's a start.

>
> Basically, everything with submodules has to be done manually every time and 
> there seems
> to be no way to change that default.
>
> Why is that? Basically all the time I use submodules I would want automatic 
> handling of
> submodules to happen and I cannot  remember having had a single situation 
> where I would
> not have wanted it to happen. So  why does git default to doing nothing?

It's hard to pick a default that suits every workflow that submodules
support. Also with submodules there is a chicken-and-egg scenario.
While you can put things in ~/.gitconfig most of what you'd want to
configure when using submodules would be in super/.git/config but that
doesn't exist until you've cloned super.git.

> Why does it not provide a way to enable automatic
> pulling/updating of submodules e.g. when cloning or switching branches?

I believe Jens and Stefan (Cc'd) have been doing some great work in
this area. Jens even posted his todo list a few days ago
(https://github.com/jlehmann/git-submod-enhancements/wiki).

> When would people routinely check out a branch and want to stay with the 
> submodules as
> the have been checked out for the old branch?
>
> I honestly do not understand it.
>
> John
>
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