Subject: [PATCH] doc: clarify description of 'submodule.recurse'

From: "Philippe Blain via GitGitGadget" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2021 03:02:57 +0000

From: Philippe Blain <[email-masked]>

The doc for 'submodule.recurse' starts with "Specifies if commands
recurse into submodles by default". This is not exactly true of all
commands that have a '--recurse-submodules' option. For example, 'git
pull --recurse-submodules' does not run 'git pull' in each submodule,
but rather runs 'git submodule update --recursive' so that the submodule
working trees after the pull matches the commits recorded in the
superproject.

Clarify that by just saying that it enables '--recurse-submodules'.

Note that the way this setting interacts with 'fetch.recurseSubmodules'
and 'push.recurseSubmodules', which can have other values than true or
false, is already documented since 4da9e99e6e (doc: be more precise on
(fetch|push).recurseSubmodules, 2020-04-06).

Signed-off-by: Philippe Blain <[email-masked]>
---
    doc: clarify description of 'submodule.recurse'
    
    The current wording confused at least one user [1], so let's clarify
    that.
    
    [1]
    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4611512/is-there-a-way-to-make-git-pull-automatically-update-submodules/49427199?noredirect=1#comment119208094_49427199

Published-As: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/releases/tag/pr-997%2Fphil-blain%2Fsubmodule.recurse-doc-clarify-v1
Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git pr-997/phil-blain/submodule.recurse-doc-clarify-v1
Pull-Request: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/pull/997

 Documentation/config/submodule.txt | 5 +++--
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/config/submodule.txt b/Documentation/config/submodule.txt
index d7a63c8c12b..ee454f8126a 100644
--- a/Documentation/config/submodule.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config/submodule.txt
@@ -58,8 +58,9 @@ submodule.active::
 	commands. See linkgit:gitsubmodules[7] for details.
 
 submodule.recurse::
-	Specifies if commands recurse into submodules by default. This
-	applies to all commands that have a `--recurse-submodules` option
+	A boolean indicating if commands should enable the `--recurse-submodules`
+	option by default.
+	Applies to all commands that support this option
 	(`checkout`, `fetch`, `grep`, `pull`, `push`, `read-tree`, `reset`,
 	`restore` and `switch`) except `clone` and `ls-files`.
 	Defaults to false.

base-commit: d486ca60a51c9cb1fe068803c3f540724e95e83a
-- 
gitgitgadget