Re: RFC: display dirty submodule working directory in git gui and gitk

Hi,

On Sat, 2 Jan 2010, Jens Lehmann wrote:

Now that we have much better output when displaying diffs of submodules 
in git gui and gitk (many thanks to all involved!), another usability 
issue shows up: A dirty working directory of a submodule isn't visible 
in git gui or gitk.

So you might think a "submodule update" would be ok - as you see no 
changes - just too see it fail because the submodules working directory 
is dirty.

Or - even worse - you /think/ you committed your changes in a submodule 
while you didn't. That can lead to 'interesting' problems which can be 
pretty hard to diagnose (like breaking builds on other peoples 
machines).


A possible solution could look like this:

AFAICS, git gui and gitk use "git diff-files" both to get the file names 
of unstaged local changes and to later display the actual differences.

If they could tell the diff core to also check the submodule working 
directories and to output an extra line - maybe something like 
"Submodule <name> contains uncommitted local changes" - when a 
submodules working directory is dirty, git gui and gitk could show the 
submodules state adequately.

The real problem is that submodules in the current form are not very well 
designed.  For example, a submodule being at a different commit than in 
the superproject's index is not as fatal as the submodule having changes.

So in the long run, IMHO a proper redesign of the submodules would not 
make only a little sense (it does not help, though, that those who 
implemented and furthered the current approach over other discussed 
approaches do not use submodules themselves -- not even now).

In ths short run, we can paper over the shortcomings of the submodules by 
introducing a command line option "--include-submodules" to 
update-refresh, diff-files and diff-index, though.

The implementation might be a bit tricky as parts of Git's source code 
still use the_index, but at least adding the submodule's object database 
is no longer that difficult.

Ciao,
Dscho