On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 1:30 PM, Casey Fitzpatrick [off-list ref] wrote:

It also seems to be missing "--progress", and I imagine others.
Perhaps submodule add/update should be reworked to automatically
accept all the options that clone would?

--progress is not missing, but I see that it isn't documented. It was
added in 72c5f88311 ("clone: pass --progress decision to recursive
submodules", 2016-09-22). What you're suggesting makes sense, but as
shown in that commit it's not easy for it to happen automatically,
there's a lot of boilerplate involved.

But since you're interested you can see how to add new options with
that patch, it should be easy for anyone not experienced with the
codebase, it's all just boilerplate + adding a test.

On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 4:29 AM, Casey Fitzpatrick [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

This seems to be a hole in the git feature set. I believe it is fairly
easily worked around, but it would be best to provide the option for
ease of use (and maybe performance?).

git clone has both a --reference feature and a --dissociate option,
with dissociate allowing for a reference to *only* speed up network
transfers rather than have the resulting clone rely upon the reference
always being there (creates an independent repo).
But git submodule only allows for --reference, so there isn't a an
option to make a speedy independent submodule clone in one shot:
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-submodule
I checked the latest online documentation (currently at 2.16.3) and
the documentation in the latest sources (almost 2.18):
https://github.com/git/git/blob/next/Documentation/git-submodule.txt

As far as I am aware this can be worked around with 'git repack -a'
and manual removal of the objects/info/alternates file afterward.
Though I don't know if this results in a less speedy clone than
dissociate would.