Re: [RFD] Long term plan with submodule refs?

Jonathan Tan [off-list ref] writes:

What if, in the submodule, we have a new ref backend that mirrors the
superproject? When initializing the submodule, its original refs are not
cloned at all, but instead virtual refs are used.
...
These rules seem straightforward to me (although I have been working
with Git for a while, so perhaps I'm not the best judge), and I think
leads to a good workflow, as discussed below.

Indeed this is intriguing.

The above rules allow the following workflow:
 - "checkout --recurse-submodules" the branch you want on the
   superproject
 - make whatever changes you want in each submodule
 - commit each individual submodule (which updates the index of the
   superproject), then commit the superproject (we can introduce a
   commit --recurse-submodules to make this more convenient)

The "recurse" option would also give users an extra atomicity, and
would not be merely for convenience; when a user wants to treat a
superproject and its two submodules as if the combined whole were a
single repository, there shouldn't be two separate commits in the
history of the superproject only because two submodules made one
commit each to work on a single theme that spans all of them.