Thanks for the review of the whole series!

I have redone this series, addressing all your comments. I addressed
this comment differently than suggested, and put the submodule
repository argument at the end of the parameter list, such that it
goes with all the other arguments to be filled in.

Sounds good.

I was about to resend the series, but test-merged with the other
submodule series in flight (origin/sb/submodule-recursive-fetch-gets-the-tip)
which had some conflicts that I can easily resolve by rebasing on top.

I presume you are talking about [1]? Maybe consider rebasing that one on
top of this instead, since this is just a refactoring whereas
submodule-recursive-fetch-gets-the-tip changes functionality, from what
I understand of patches 8 and 9.

[1] https://public-inbox.org/git/20181016181327.107186-1-sbeller@google.com/

It conflicts a lot when merging to next, due to the latest patch
("Apply semantic patches from previous patches"), so I am not sure
how to proceed properly. Maybe we'd omit that patch and
run 'make coccicheck' on next to apply the semantic patches
there instead.

Omitting the patch sounds good to me. For me, just stating that you have
excluded any coccinelle-generated patches in order to ease merging into
the various branches is sufficient, and people can test the coccinelle
patches included by running "make coccicheck" then "patch -p1
<contrib/coccinelle/the_repository.cocci.patch".