git-archive and submodules

["André Caron" <andre.l.caron@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I've recently needed to create a source code archive as part of a
custom build target.  This repository uses submodules and I need to
include the submodlule's source code in the archives too.  However,
git-archive does not have any option to do so.

I've taken a quick look at the GMANE mailing list archives and it
seems this provoked quite a discussion in 2009 and that Lars Hjemli
even wrote a patch (in several flavors) for archive.c to include
submodule-aware processing.  The lastest source code at
`git.kernel.org` does not contain any traces of this patch (or
submodule aware logic for that matter).  The mailing list archives are
not very convenient to browse and I can't figure out what the status
on this submodule-aware git-archive idea is.  Has this idea been
completely rejected, or is it still work in progress?

In case you're wondering, I don't seem to be the only one needing to
do this.  I found at least two scripts on GitHub that implement this
logic with various levels of accuracy/completeness[1][2] and I've
hacked an icky Windows batch file version [3] for minimal Windows
support until this feature can be implemented in Git itself.  I don't
mind putting in some time into a real patch if I need to, but I'm
curious about the fact that this has been requested before, a patch
was proposed and yet this is still not merged 4 years later.

So, what's the status on a submodule-aware git-archive command?

Thanks,
André

[1]: https://github.com/meitar/git-archive-all.sh
[2]: https://github.com/Kentzo/git-archive-all
[3]: https://github.com/AndreLouisCaron/git-archive-all.bat