Re: Confusing behavior with ignored submodules and `git commit -a`

I have a git repository which contains a number of submodules that
refer to external repositories. Some of these repositories need to
patched in some way, so patches are stored alongside the submodules,
and are applied when building. This mostly works fine, but causes
submodules to show up as modified in `git status` and get updated with
`git commit -a`. To resolve this, I've added `ignore = all` to
.gitmodules for all the submodules that need patches applied. This
way, I can explicitly `git add` the submodule when I want to update
the base commit, but otherwise pretend that they are clean. This has
worked pretty well for me, but less so since git 2.15 when this issue
was introduced.

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This is really bad. git-status and git-commit share some code,
and we'll populate the commit message with a status output.
So it seems reasonable to expect the status and the commit to match,
i.e. if status tells me there is no change, then commit should not record
the submodule update.

I just checked and if I don't specify a message on the command-line,
the status output in the message template *does* mention that `inner`
is getting updated.

That's good.

quoted

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There have been a couple occasions where I accidentally pushed local
changes to ignored submodules because of this. Since they don't show
up in the log output, it is difficult to figure out what actually has
gone wrong.

How was it prevented before? Just by git commit -a not picking up the
submodule change?

Yes. Previously, `git commit -a` would not pick up the change (unless
I added it explicitly with `git add`), and `git log` would still show
changes to ignored submodules (which is the behavior I want).

and both are broken currently (commit -a will commit a submodule if
it is changed, and it will also not show that in log, but it did show that
it is committing it in the commit message template)

I just came across someone else affected by this issue:
https://github.com/git/git/commit/55568086#commitcomment-27137460

Point taken.