Subject: Re: git-clone ignores submodule.recurse configuration

From: Brandon Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2017 13:47:09 -0800

On 12/01, Ralf Thielow wrote:
> Today I played around a bit with git submodules and noticed
> that the very handy configuration "submodule.recurse" is not
> working for the git-clone command.
> 
> "git help config" tells me that submodule.recurse affects
> all commands that have a --recurse-submodules option.
> git-clone seems to be an exception which is also mentioned in
> a workflow example in Documentation/gitsubmodules.txt that
> says:
> 
>   # Unlike the other commands below clone still needs
>   # its own recurse flag:
>   git clone --recurse <URL> <directory>
>   cd <directory>
> 
> So this seems to be a known issue. Is someone already
> working on this or has a plan to do it? Or is there a reason
> not doing this for git-clone but for git-pull?

When we introduced the "submodule.recurse" config we explicitly had it
not work with clone because a recursive clone ends up pulling data from
other sources aside from the URL the user explicitly provides.
Historically there have been a number of security related bugs with
respect to cloning submodules so we felt it was best to require a
recursive clone to be requested explicitly, at least for the time being.

-- 
Brandon Williams