Re: [PATCH] Clarify role of init command in git-submodules documentation

[Sven Verdoolaege <skimo@kotnet.org>]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 11:03:49PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
> also sprach Sven Verdoolaege <skimo@kotnet.org> [2007.08.21.2225 +0200]:
> > >   Users who clone the project's repository need to initialize each
> > >   submodule before they can work with it. By initializing
> > 
> > I suppose this is implicit in the git submodule man page,
> 
> It wasn't to me; that's why I am doing all this.

I meant that the rest of my sentence could probably be
implicitly understood.

> > but this is only true if you actually want to use git submodule to
> > work with the submodules.
> 
> Is it? I tried this and after cloning a repo with submodules, it
> created the submodule directories alright, but it did not actually
> check them out/populate them, so they were empty.

Some people have been doing this manually or have homegrown scripts.
Not that you should mention those options here.

> 
> > >   a submodule, the submodule's url is copied from the
> > >   .gitmodules
> > 
> > As I mentioned before, this is not strictly true. (see init::)
> 
> You're missing something like "... unless the submodule is already
> registered, in which case it won't be overwritten", right?

Something like that, yes.

skimo