Re: Git issues with submodules

[Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>]

[+CC: Jens, the goto-guy for submodules]

Sergey Sharybin wrote:
> Namely, `git ls-files -m` will show addons as modified, regardless
> ignore=all configuration. In the same time `git diff-index --name-only
> HEAD --` will show no changes at all.

This happens because diff-index handles submodules explicitly (see
diff-lib.c), while ls-files doesn't (see builtin/ls-files.c). My
opinion is that this is a bug, and git ls-files needs to be taught to
handle submodules properly.

> This leads to issues with Arcanist (which is a Phabricator's tool) who
> considers addons as uncommited changes and either complains on this or
> just adds this to commits.

Does Arcanist use `git ls-files -m` to check?

> There're also some more issues which happens to our
> developers and which i can not quite reproduce.

Do try to track down the other issues and let us know.

> Sometimes it happens so git checkout to another branch yields about
> uncommited changes to addons and doesn't checkout to another branch.

I've seldom used submodules with branches, so I'll let others chime in.

Cheers.