[...]

all good reasons; ship it :-)

All at the cost of recording a little configuration somewhere.  If we
want to decrease the configuration, we can avoid recording it there in
the easy cases (e.g. when name == gitdirname).  That's "just" an
optimization.

Sounds good, but gerrit for example would not take advantage of such
optimisation as they have slashes in their submodules. :-(
I wonder if we can optimize further and keep slashes if there is
no conflict (as then name == gitdirname, so it can be optimized).

And then we have the ability later to handle all the edge cases we
haven't handled yet today:

- sharding when the number of submodules is too large
- case-insensitive filesystems
- path name length limits
- different sets of filesystem-special characters

Sane?

I'll keep thinking about it.

FYI: the reduction in configuration was just sent out.

Thanks,
Stefan