Subject: [PATCH 0/2] fetch: make submodule fetch errors configurable

From: Paulius Zaleckas <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:39:36 +0300

When fetching with --recurse-submodules, git currently exits with a
non-zero status if any submodule references an OID that is not reachable
from the submodule's remote.  This situation arises naturally when an
upstream branch is still in preparation (e.g. a topic branch in a merge
window): the local branch does not depend on the missing commit, so a
hard failure is unnecessarily disruptive.

Patch 1 fixes a pre-existing NEEDSWORK in submodule.c where a phase-1
fetch failure was recorded immediately, even when a phase-2 OID-based
retry was about to be scheduled.  After this fix the existing fatal
behaviour is preserved but the logic is now structured so that errors
are only recorded when the phase-2 retry actually fails.

Patch 2 introduces fetch.submoduleErrors (fail|warn) and
--submodule-errors=<fail|warn> to let users opt into non-fatal
behaviour.  The default remains fail for full backwards compatibility.

Paulius Zaleckas (2):
  submodule: fix premature failure in recursive submodule fetch
  fetch: add fetch.submoduleErrors to make submodule fetch errors
    non-fatal

 Documentation/config/fetch.adoc | 14 +++++
 builtin/fetch.c                 | 39 +++++++++++++-
 submodule.c                     | 52 +++++++++++++-----
 submodule.h                     |  7 ++-
 t/t5526-fetch-submodules.sh     | 96 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 5 files changed, 192 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-)

-- 
2.53.0