When cloning subrepo containing submodules, Git complains about missing .gitmodules

[nyanpasu64]

I have a project based around git-subrepo. When I added STX as a subrepo, it imported STX's submodules as-is (https://github.com/nyanpasu64/qvgmsplit/tree/073f8e0731f13a2a9ed36871acb4627ff532243d/3rdparty/STX/third_party) but didn't create a top-level .gitmodules file (but instead keeps "3rdparty/STX/.gitmodules").

Git doesn't know how to handle this state. Running git submodule produces errors:fatal: no submodule mapping found in .gitmodules for path '3rdparty/STX/third_party/abseil' or 3rdparty/STX/third_party/benchmark or 3rdparty/STX/third_party/googletest. The same thing happens when GitHub Actions's checkout action attempts to cleanup after a clone (actions/checkout#610). I think this would create issues for people performing a recursive clone as well.

Is it possible to alter git-subrepo to add an option to ignore submodules in the repo being cloned/pulled?

(Is git-subrepo dead?)

[admorgan]

This has been investigated a few times, but having a git subrepo that contains a git submodule isn't a scenario that we have been able to get working so far. The problem actually exists with git trees also.

The problem I see with the suggestion of filtering submodules out of subrepos is how do you communicate to the user that dependencies have changed on a pull or clone? I believe the documentation stating that subrepo does not support code that contains submodules is unlikely to change any time soon.

At the same time a PR that fixes this would be enthusiastically accepted.