Re: Add an option to automatically submodule update on checkout

[Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>]

On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 10:08 AM, Brandon Williams <bmwill@google.com> wrote:
>>
>> >[submodule "gnulib"]
>> >    path=./gnulib
>> >    external = true # implies no branch for checkout -b --recurse-submodules
>>
>> >I think there are a couple more situations where such "external" submodules are treated differently, so maybe we'd want to think carefully about the >actual name as different workflows would want to have different features for an internal/external submodule.
>>
>> I didn't want to open up that one, but yes. That makes sense. However, I don't like overloading what "external" means or might mean in the future. Would you consider a distinct Boolean for that, like inherit-branch=true?
>
> Something like that kind of already exists.  The 'branch' field.
> Internal repos would most likely use the '.' value to indicate that the
> submodules should track the superproject's branch.  While a value of say
> 'foo' would indicate that the submodule should always be on branch
> 'foo'; this could be used for external repositories.

so for external repos you'd keep the branch unset, such that
you strictly checkout the sha1 object into a detached HEAD.

Makes sense.

Thanks,
Stefan