Re: switching branches when they use different submodule remotes

Stephen Bannasch [off-list ref] writes:

it made it clear that executing init does not alter existing
information in .git/config so I deleted the reference in ./git/config
manually and started over.

Is there a better way to handle this?

Perhaps "submodule sync"?

There are at least two different scenarios where you may have multiple
URLs for a given submodule path.

 - These two URLs may represent two projects with different histories, and
   depending on the commit that is checked out, your superproject may want
   to use a URL for the repository that appears in .gitmodules that is
   checked out.  "submodule sync" would be one solution for this case.

 - These two URLs may represent a single project but the repository
   migrated and the old URL may not even work anymore.  In such a case,
   even when you checked out an old commit of the superproject, you do not
   want to use the old and now decommissioned URL in the .gitmodules file.

There can be combinations and variants of the above two.

In very early days of "git submodule" Porcelain support, there were a lot
of design discussion taking these two situations into account.  I don't
recall the details, but the core idea was:

 - record a tuple <the value chosen by the user, the value the user saw in
   .gitmodules when the user chose the value> in .git/config;

 - when .gitmodules has a value that the user has not seen, ask the user
   what to do. The user may want to use the value recorded in .gitmodules,
   or may want to use the value already in .git/config.  This would result
   in a new tuple <the value chosen, the value in .gitmodules> recorded in
   .git/config;

 - when .gitmodules has a value that the user has seen, use the
   corresponding value the user chose to use.

which would have solved both use cases; unfortunately, nobody has been
inclined to implement anything like that so far.