Re: [PATCH 01/10] submodule: decouple url and submodule existence

Brandon Williams [off-list ref] writes:

On 02/24, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Also as a grouping measure, submodule.active that lists submodule
paths feels hard to use.  When switching between two branches in the
superproject that have the same submodule bound at two different
paths, who is responsible for updating submodule.active in
superproject's config?  If it were a list of submodule names, this
objection does not apply, though.

I agree that if you are listing every submodule path by hand then this
may not be the best approach and would be difficult to use.  The idea is
that this would allow a user to set a general pathspec to identify a
group of modules they are interested in.  Perhaps once attributes can be
used in pathspecs a user could group submodules by setting a particular
attribute and then submodule.active would have a value like
":(attr:foo)" to indicate I'm interested in all submodules with the
"foo" attribute.

OK.  As .gitattributes is tracked just like .gitmodules in tree, the
project can adjust the path pattern that matches a renamed submodule
and gives it an attribute in .gitattributes in the same commit in
the superproject that moves the directory to which the submodule is
bound, just like it updates .gitmodules to adjust the name<->path
mapping.  So that plan solves my specific worry about using "path"
for grouping and not "name".

Thanks.