Re: [RFC] Third round of support for cloning submodules

Martin Waitz, Sun, May 20, 2007 23:40:26 +0200:

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 - What would we do when the subproject working tree is not
   clean?

I was planning on adding a --dry-run to git-checkout.
The superproject would run this in each subproject before
doing the actual checkout of the superproject.

Why not do exactly what we do now? Pass "-m" down to it, if it was
given to the top-level git-checkout.

sounds good.
With submodules we have to consider one extra level of merging.
-m in the supermodule also means that an automatic merge of the
dirlink entry should be done.  Which would execute git-merge in the
submodule.  And merging in a dirty tree is a challenge of its own.

But it is not a merge. It is a checkout. Being another operation it
may even be disallow merges of subprojects. Just plainly tell user
that this checkout is not possible because there are changes in
subprojects and in the pointer to this subproject in the upper level
superproject, and that the user should think about committing in
subproject first.

So if local changes conflict with the checkout we should just error out.

On account of it being too complex. Always a good reason.