Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 3/3] grep: add support for grepping in submodules

From: Jens Lehmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2010 21:48:16 +0200

Am 30.09.2010 20:59, schrieb Heiko Voigt:
> How about dropping the option all together and making grep search all
> populated submodules by default and maybe have an option to turn it off.

And that option might be called "--no-recursive"? :-)

But when we add an config setting to control the default behavior
later (which we had to do for all submodule recursion features so far
where we changed the default to recursion) we'll need the "--recursive"
option again anyway to be able to override the config setting. So I
vote for just leaving the option as it is for now, and we can discuss
the proper default as we go along (And in case of grep I have not made
up my mind as to what a sane default would be, personally I'm fine with
having to use the "--recursive" option when I want recursion, but I
won't object to making it the default either).

> Since git grep is searching recursive by default this would be what I
> would expect as a user. Are there other reasons to turn off the search
> in submodules than the potential runtime penalty because of forks? 

The runtime penalty is a *very* important aspect, as we have some
submodule users who have put huge trees into submodules especially to
avoid the performance penalties (see the discussions for recursive
diff and status). So if we change the default, we will have to
provide an config option for that.