Re: Re: [RFC v2] submodule: Respect requested branch on all clones

2014/1/8 W. Trevor King [off-list ref]:

To elaborate the idea I sketched out here [2], say
you want:

  Superproject branch  Submodule branch  Upstream branch
  ===================  ================  ===============
  master               master            master
  super-feature        master            master
  my-feature           my-feature        master
  other-feature        other-feature     other-feature

That's only going to work with per-superproject-branch configs for
both the local and remote branches.  Using the same name for both
local and remote branches does not work.

After long thoughts, I think your idea about a local branch with a
differently named remote branch looks interesting but I would be
extremely cautious to add a ' submodule.<name>.local-branch' now. Do
we have a similar mechanism on regular repository clones? We can clone
and switch to a branch other than "master" by default, but can we also
have a different remote by default? If we don't have it, we shouldn't
add it first on submodules, as there's the chance the feature never
get coupled on  the regular clones.

Also, I think you fear too much that this can't be added also later.

I think you should pursue your initial proposal of "--branch means
attached" to get it upstream first. It's alone, IMO, a great
improvement on submodules.