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

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Brandon Williams <bmwill@google.com> writes:

> Allow ls-files to recognize submodules in order to retrieve a list of
> files from a repository's submodules.  This is done by forking off a
> process to recursively call ls-files on all submodules.

While I see why "ls-files --recurse-submodules" sounds nice ("hey, I
can get list of _all_ the files here"), and I am quite happy with
the quality of implementation (not just the code but its
documentation and test) especially from a first-time contributor, I
am not quite sure what the utility of this new feature would be,
especially given that the command is a plumbing, i.e. meant to be a
useful building block for scripts.

If I get

	$ git ls-files --recurse-submodules
	Makefile
        lib/Makefile
        lib/hello.py
	main.py
	goodbye.py

out of the command, what can I do with it without knowing where the
submodule boundaries are?  It's not like I can just do

	git ls-files --recurse-submodule |
        while read path
        do
        	git update-index --add "$path"
	done

when "lib/" is a submodule.  Instead, I'd need to go to "lib/" and
then add "Makefile" and "hello.py" from there.

> diff --git a/t/t3007-ls-files-recurse-submodules.sh b/t/t3007-ls-files-recurse-submodules.sh
> new file mode 100644
> index 0000000..78deded
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/t/t3007-ls-files-recurse-submodules.sh
> @@ -0,0 +1,103 @@
> +...
> +test_expect_success 'setup directory structure and submodules' '
> +...
> +'
> +
> +cat >expect <<EOF
> +.gitmodules
> +a
> +b/b
> +submodule/c
> +EOF

We used to do that when we didn't know better.

Please don't do things outside test_expect_* block, especially in a
new script.