Re: Confusing behavior with ignored submodules and `git commit -a`

[Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>]

> I have a git repository which contains a number of submodules that
> refer to external repositories. Some of these repositories need to
> patched in some way, so patches are stored alongside the submodules,
> and are applied when building. This mostly works fine, but causes
> submodules to show up as modified in `git status` and get updated with
> `git commit -a`. To resolve this, I've added `ignore = all` to
> .gitmodules for all the submodules that need patches applied. This
> way, I can explicitly `git add` the submodule when I want to update
> the base commit, but otherwise pretend that they are clean. This has
> worked pretty well for me, but less so since git 2.15 when this issue
> was introduced.

> > This is really bad. git-status and git-commit share some code,
> > and we'll populate the commit message with a status output.
> > So it seems reasonable to expect the status and the commit to match,
> > i.e. if status tells me there is no change, then commit should not record
> > the submodule update.
>
> I just checked and if I don't specify a message on the command-line,
> the status output in the message template *does* mention that `inner`
> is getting updated.

That's good.

> >> > There have been a couple occasions where I accidentally pushed local
> >> > changes to ignored submodules because of this. Since they don't show
> >> > up in the log output, it is difficult to figure out what actually has
> >> > gone wrong.
> >
> > How was it prevented before? Just by git commit -a not picking up the
> > submodule change?
>
> Yes. Previously, `git commit -a` would not pick up the change (unless
> I added it explicitly with `git add`), and `git log` would still show
> changes to ignored submodules (which is the behavior I want).

and both are broken currently (commit -a will commit a submodule if
it is changed, and it will also not show that in log, but it did show that
it is committing it in the commit message template)

> I just came across someone else affected by this issue:
> https://github.com/git/git/commit/55568086#commitcomment-27137460

Point taken.