Re: Add an option to automatically submodule update on checkout

On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 10:08 AM, Brandon Williams [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

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[submodule "gnulib"]
   path=./gnulib
   external = true # implies no branch for checkout -b --recurse-submodules

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I think there are a couple more situations where such "external" submodules are treated differently, so maybe we'd want to think carefully about the >actual name as different workflows would want to have different features for an internal/external submodule.

I didn't want to open up that one, but yes. That makes sense. However, I don't like overloading what "external" means or might mean in the future. Would you consider a distinct Boolean for that, like inherit-branch=true?

Something like that kind of already exists.  The 'branch' field.
Internal repos would most likely use the '.' value to indicate that the
submodules should track the superproject's branch.  While a value of say
'foo' would indicate that the submodule should always be on branch
'foo'; this could be used for external repositories.

so for external repos you'd keep the branch unset, such that
you strictly checkout the sha1 object into a detached HEAD.

Makes sense.

Thanks,
Stefan