A Git story: Not so fun this time - eviltoast
  • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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    4 months ago

    Do you actually have any specific, tangible issue with submodules?

    Yeah sure. These are few that I can remember off the top of my head. There have been more:

    • Submodules don’t work reliably with worktrees. I can’t remember what kind of bugs you run into but you will run into bugs if you mix them up. The official docs even warn you not to.

    • When you switch branches or pull you pretty much always have to git submodule update --init --recursive. Wouldn’t it be great if git could do that for you? Turns out it can, via an option called submodule.recurse. However… if you use this you will run into a very bad bug that will seriously break your .git directory.

    • If you convert a submodule to a directory or vice versa and then switch between them git will get very confused and you’ll have to do some rm -rfing.

    Even in the cases you’re clearly and grossly misusing them

    Oh right, so the bugs in Git are my fault. Ok whatever idiot.