Re: [PATCH 0/2] Tests for some submodule corner cases.

Marc Branchaud [off-list ref] writes:

Note that my automated builds don't really care about possibly-modified files
or anything like that.  They just want the exact tree that corresponds to the
commit ID recorded in the superproject.  (Previous builds might've left some
cruft lying around, and the automated build wants to be sure that's eliminated.)

Maybe I should just forego the status-checking altogether, and do "git
submodule update path/to/sub && (cd path/to/sub; git reset --hard HEAD; git
clean -dx)".

It really depends on what you really care about. If the working tree is
shared between your build-bot and a human user, the build-bot may want to
make sure it does not overwrite and lose work by a human, but otherwise,
instead of checking if something is stale (and having to design what to do
when it actually finds something is stale), actively causing the state it
wants to see appear in the working tree sounds like a simpler, more robust
and much saner thing to do.