Subject: Re: [PATCH v2.1] commit: add --ignore-submodules[=<when>] parameter

From: Ronald Weiss <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 23:59:06 +0200

On 1. 4. 2014 22:23, Jens Lehmann wrote:
> Am 01.04.2014 01:35, schrieb Ronald Weiss:
>> On 1. 4. 2014 0:50, Ronald Weiss wrote:
>>> On 31. 3. 2014 23:47, Ronald Weiss wrote:
>>>> On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 8:58 PM, Jens Lehmann <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>>>> As Junio mentioned it would be great if you could teach the add
>>>>> command also honor the --ignore-submodule command line option in
>>>>> a companion patch. In the course of doing so you'll easily see if
>>>>> I was right or not, then please just order them in the most logical
>>>>> way.
>>>>
>>>> Well, if You (or Junio) really don't want my patch without another one
>>>> for git add, I may try to do it. However, git add does not even honor
>>>> the submodules' ignore setting from .gitmodules (just tested with git
>>>> 1.9.1: "git add -u" doesn't honor it, while "git commit -a" does). So
>>>> teaching git add the --ignore-submodules switch in current state
>>>> doesn't seem right to me. You might propose to add also support for
>>>> the ignore setting, to make "add -u" and "commit -a" more consistent.
>>>> That seems like a good idea, but the effort needed is getting bigger,
>>>
>>> Well, now I actually looked at it, and it was pretty easy after all.
>>> The changes below seem to enable support for both ignore setting in
>>> .gitmodules, and also --ignore-submodules switch, for git add, on top
>>> of my patch for commit.
>>
>> There is a catch. With the changes below, submodules are ignored by add even if explitely named on command line (eg. "git add x" does nothing if x is submodule with new commits, but with ignore=all in .gitmodules).
>> That doesn't seem right.
>>
>> Any ideas, what to do about that? When exactly should such submodule be actually ignored?
> 
> Me thinks git add should require the '-f' option to add an ignored
> submodule (just like it does for files) unless the user uses the
> '--ignore-submodules=none' option. And if neither of these are given
> it should "fail with a list of ignored files" as the documentation
> states.

It's still not clear, at least not to me. Should '-f' suppress the
ignore setting of all involved submodules? That would make it a
synonyme (or a superset) of --ignore-submodules=none. Or only if the
submodule is explicitly named on command line? That seems fuzzy to me,
and also more tricky to implement.