Re: [RFC/PATCH] Disallow commands from within unpopulated submodules.

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

And in my current understanding of submodules the check in
.gitmodules ought to be enough, too.

Yeah, that probably makes sense. You can have a gitlink without a
.gitmodules file, but I don't quite know what that would mean in terms
of submodules (I guess it's not a submodule but "something else").

That may be a lot better than reading the index unconditionally, but
I'd rather not to see "git rev-parse" read ".gitmodules" at all.  It
would discourage scripted use of Git for no good reason.