Subject: Re: RFC: display dirty submodule working directory in git gui and gitk

From: Jens Lehmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:04:16 +0100

Am 04.01.2010 10:44, schrieb Johannes Schindelin:
> The real problem is that submodules in the current form are not very well 
> designed.

IMVHO using the tree sha1 for a submodule seems to be the 'natural' way
to include another git repo. And it gives the reproducibility i expect
from a scm. Or am i missing something?

It looks to me as most shortcomings come from the fact that most git
commands tend to ignore submodules (and if they don't, like git gui and
gitk do now, they e.g. only show certain aspects of their state).

Submodules are in heavy use in our company since last year. Virtually
every patch i submitted for submodules came from that experience and
scratched an itch i or one of my colleagues had (and the situation did
already improve noticeably by the few things we changed). We are still
convinced that using submodules was the right decision. But some work
has still to be done to be able to use them easily and to get rid of
some pitfalls.

> In ths short run, we can paper over the shortcomings of the submodules by 
> introducing a command line option "--include-submodules" to 
> update-refresh, diff-files and diff-index, though.

Maybe this is the way to go for now (and hopefully we can turn this
option on by default later because we did the right thing ;-).