Re: Relative submodule URLs, and forks that haven't forked the submodule

So let me see if I understand you correctly.


On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 12:15:39PM +0200, Charles Brossollet wrote:

Hi,

I'm banging my head on this problem: I have a central repo cloned by SSH, and a fork on the same server. The central remote is origin, and the fork is chbrosso-wip.

$ git remote -v | grep origin
origin  chbrosso@lltech:/git/lightct.git (fetch)
origin  chbrosso@lltech:/git/lightct.git (push)

$ git remote -v | grep chbrosso-wip
chbrosso-wip    chbrosso@lltech:~/prog/git/lightct.git (fetch)
chbrosso-wip    chbrosso@lltech:~/prog/git/lightct.git (push)

On a local working copy, fetched my fork and checked out a remote branch out of it. Its remote-tracking branch is on the fork.

$ git branch -vv | grep \*
* actor                         d98ec24 [chbrosso-wip/actor] (commit msg)

Now, submodules for this repo have relative URLs. And this is where the problem begins, because the submodule isn't forked, but resides only in origin.

Fork is not a git thing. It's not a git command and it's not supported
by git. You can of course easily do a "fork" of a git project, but git
will be unaware of it beeing a fork.

What you're saying is that you've one repository:

lightct.git and one other repository which is a submodule to lightct.git
at motors.git. Then you've made a copy of lightct.git to an other place
for example: /some/other/path/lightct.git and the naturally the
submodule path that's relative will point to /some/other/path/motors.git
that doesn't exists, since you haven't copied motors.git

But this shouldn't cause any problem, right? The docs says that if relative URL are used, they resolve using the origin URL. First issue, it's not the case:

Orgin refers to the repository you cloned from. That is if you did
git clone lightct.git my_working_copy

the origin for my_working_copy would be lightct.git. However if you did
git clone /some/other/path/lightct.git my_working_copy

the origin for my_working_copy would be /some/other/path/lightct.git

So to me it seems to be correct.

$ cat .gitmodules
[submodule "motors"]
        path = motors
        url = ../motors.git
        branch = master
$ git submodule init motors
Submodule 'motors' (chbrosso@lltech:~/prog/git/motors.git) registered for path 'motors'

Here the submodule is registered on my fork, which doesn't exist, and it's wrong with what the documentation says.

Fine, I'll edit the .git/config entry to make it point to origin:

$ git config submodule.motors.url chbrosso@lltech:/git/motors.git

$ git config submodule.motors.url
chbrosso@lltech:/git/motors.git

$ ssh chbrosso@lltech "if  [ -d /git/motors.git ]; then echo 'ok'; fi"
Password:
ok

So the submodule's url is changed, and points to a correct path, let's update so that I can work

$ git submodule update motors
Password:
fatal: '~/prog/git/motors.git' does not appear to be a git repository
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights and the repository exists.
Unable to fetch in submodule path 'motors'

That's right, it is still the old url, and I can't have my submodule!

Here you change the path to the submodule at
/some/other/path/lightct.git and then it isn't changed in my_working_copy. How could it? They don't communicate if you don't tell them to.

Can someone explain what's going on? And how can I get my submodule in the working copy?

Either created a copy of the submodule just as you did with lightct.git
or use non-relative paths.

-- 
Med vänlig hälsning
Fredrik Gustafsson

tel: 0733-608274
e-post: iveqy@iveqy.com