Re: [RFC PATCH 09/10] submodule: support reading .gitmodules even when it's not checked out

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 3:58 AM, Antonio Ospite [off-list ref] wrote:

When the .gitmodules file is not available in the working directory, try
using HEAD:.gitmodules from the index.

I think HEAD:.gitmodules is different than the index (the former is
part of the latest commit, whereas the index could have changed via
git-add, that is not committed yet).

This covers the case when the
file is part of the repository but for some reason it is not checked
out, for example because of a sparse checkout.

This makes it possible to use at least the 'git submodule' commands
which *read* the gitmodules configuration file without fully populating
the work dir.

Instead of checking for an explicit sparse "hidden" could we just rely on
the file missing? Then I could continue using submodules if I just
"rm .gitmodules".

Writing to .gitmodules wills still require that the file is checked out,
so check for that in config_gitmodules_set.

That makes sense!

Signed-off-by: Antonio Ospite <redacted>
---

I am doing the is_gitmodules_hidden() check in the open for now, I am not sure
whether it is approprate to do that inside stage_updated_gitmodules.

Why do we need that check at all?

In your use case, you want to checkout *a* .gitmodules file, not necessarily
the .gitmodules file of that repo you're currently working on. So it
sort of makes
sense to prevent cross-repo changes (i.e. committing the .gitmodules
accidentally
into the wrong repo)

Stefan