Re: [PATCH] builtin/describe: introduce --broken flag

[Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>]

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 3:41 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> writes:
>
>> AFAICT, someone is (was?) using a version of Git that doesn't contain
>> f8eaa0ba98 (submodule--helper, module_clone: always operate
>> on absolute paths, 2016-03-31). So then the submodule paths were
>> made absolute paths on creation of the Gerrit repo.
>>
>> And then someone moved the repo and the absolute paths broke.
>>
>> Even after an upgrade of Git to its latest and greatest version, the underlying
>> issue of having broken submodule paths remains in that case.
>>
>> So there are a couple of ways forward
>> 0) as an immediate fix, manually fix the absolute path or make them relative
>>
>> 1A) have more error resilient tools in Git
>> 1B) have a tool in git (e.g. "git submodule fsck-setup") that rewrites
>>     the .git file link and the core.worktree setting to be relative and correct.
>>
>> I think we should do both A and B, I decided to go with A first, specifically
>> "git-describe" as that was reported to not work well in this situation with the
>> given broken data
>
> Sounds sensible.  I would say that we should do less 1A (i.e. hiding
> problems under the rug) and more 1B.  Of course, making the problem
> less likely to happen in the first place would be more important ;-)

Agreed on not introducing bugs as often. For (B), I wonder what the
right place is.

Maybe "reset --hard", in combination with "--recurse-submodules" would also
fix these submodule path issues. The made up "git submodule fsck-setup"
sounds like it would only detect (and not fix) the problems. But these absolute
paths issues are known how to fix, so a "fsck"-y tool may convey a wrong
impression.