Re: [RFC/PATCH] ls-files: adding support for submodules

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sun, Sep 11, 2016 at 08:51:06PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 11, 2016 at 03:10:13PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
> > So a "ls-files" that is done internally in the end-user facing "git
> > grep --recurse-submodules" needs to be run _without_ recursing
> > itself at least once to learn "lib/" is a submodule.  A flat "here
> > are everything we have" does not sound like a good building block.
> 
> I do not use submodules myself, but I could imagine that you may have
> scripts outside of git that do not care about the submodule divisions at
> all, and would be happy with the flat block. E.g., our "make tags"
> target uses "git ls-files" so find all of the source files. I could
> imagine projects with submodules that would want to do so recursively (I
> could also imagine projects that do _not_ want to do so; it would depend
> on your workflow and how tightly bound the submodules are). Another
> plausible example would be something grep-like that has features
> git-grep does not (I don't use "ack", but perhaps "git ls-files
> --recurse-submodules -z | xargs --null ack ..." is something people
> would want to do).

None of that negates your point, btw, which is that this does not seem
like a great building block for "git grep --recurse-submodules". Just
that it seems plausible to me that people could find recursive
"ls-files" useful on its own.

-Peff