Subject: Re: [RFC/PATCH 0/7] Rework git core for native submodules

From: Jens Lehmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 Apr 2013 09:48:13 +0200

Am 07.04.2013 23:30, schrieb Ramkumar Ramachandra:
> Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>> What's stopping the core object code of git parsing .gitmodules?

Just to clarify that: git core already does that. A "git grep
gitmodules_config" shows it is parsed by some git core commands:
checkout, commit, the diff family and fetch. Others will follow
in the recursive update series. And "git mv" support will teach
that command to manipulate the .gitmodules file (and I hope that
a patch teaching "git rm" to remove the section from .gitmodules
will be accepted in the near future).

> Nothing, except that it's perversely unnatural for object parsing code
> to parse something outside the object store.

Hmm, at least the unstaged .gitmodules file has to be parsed from
the file system. And Heiko's current work on parsing .gitmodules
directly from the object store will help here too, right?

>> How does this compare to other metadata
>> files like .gitattributes and .gitignore?
> 
> .gitignore and .gitattributes are parsed in dir.c, where git "treats"
> worktree paths.  It's quite nicely integrated.

And .gitmodules is parsed in submodule.c where Git treats
.gitmodules entries. So I don't see a problem here, what am I
missing?