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submodule: fall back to remote's HEAD for missing remote.<name>.branch

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When `remote.<name>.branch` is not configured, `git submodule update`
currently falls back to using the branch name `master`. A much better
idea, however, is to use the remote `HEAD`: on all Git servers running
reasonably recent Git versions, the symref `HEAD` points to the main
branch.

Note: t7419 demonstrates that there _might_ be use cases out there that
_expect_ `git submodule update --remote` to update submodules to the
remote `master` branch even if the remote `HEAD` points to another
branch. Arguably, this patch makes the behavior more intuitive, but
there is a slight possibility that this might cause regressions in
obscure setups.

Even so, it should be okay to fix this behavior without anything like a
longer transition period:

- The `git submodule update --remote` command is not really common.

- Current Git's behavior when running this command is outright
  confusing, unless the remote repository's current branch _is_ `master`
  (in which case the proposed behavior matches the old behavior).

- If a user encounters a regression due to the changed behavior, the fix
  is actually trivial: setting `submodule.<name>.branch` to `master`
  will reinstate the old behavior.

Helped-by: Philippe Blain <levraiphilippeblain@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This commit is contained in:
Johannes Schindelin
2020-06-24 14:46:30 +00:00
committed by Junio C Hamano
parent 4d04658d8b
commit f0a96e8d4c
5 changed files with 31 additions and 12 deletions
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6
Documentation/gitmodules.txt
View File

@ -49,9 +49,9 @@ submodule.<name>.update::
submodule.<name>.branch::
A remote branch name for tracking updates in the upstream submodule.
If the option is not specified, it defaults to 'master'. A special
value of `.` is used to indicate that the name of the branch in the
submodule should be the same name as the current branch in the
If the option is not specified, it defaults to the remote 'HEAD'.
A special value of `.` is used to indicate that the name of the branch
in the submodule should be the same name as the current branch in the
current repository. See the `--remote` documentation in
linkgit:git-submodule[1] for details.