I occasionally rebase my submodules. I realize the danger (historical submodule
pointers could point to commits that get garbage-collected away) so I always
create and push a tag before the rebase, to make sure the old commits will
never get purged. I believe this is safe, based on some experiments I’ve run.
The issue: I set the config var push.recurseSubmodules=check, and it seems to
insist on having a branch and not merely a tag. When I push the parent repo’s
commits, I get failures: "The following submodule paths contain changes that
can not be found on any remote”. This is overly pessimistic: the commits are
there on the remote, and the tag demonstrates that.
Expected behavior: when the submodule remote has a branch or a tag with the
submodule pointer as ancestor, the push.recurseSubmodules=check should succeed.
Actual behavior: the push.recurseSubmodules=check fails when only a tag, and
not any branch, contains the specific commit hash.
I’m using Git 2.18.0, but I’ve checked newer Release Notes and didn’t see
anything.
Below is a Makefile that demonstrates the unexpected failure. The “pre-rebase”
tag should be sufficient to allow the check to succeed. Run this in an empty
directory.
----
.PHONY: all clean
# Make sure no config settings, either /etc/gitconfig or ~/.gitconfig,
# affect this experiment. We will create our own ./.gitconfig.
GIT := GIT_CONFIG_NOSYSTEM=1 HOME=$(PWD) XDG_CONFIG_HOME= git
all:
# Configure globally (into ./.gitconfig)
$(GIT) config --global user.email "y...@example.com"
$(GIT) config --global user.name "Your Name"
$(GIT) config --global push.recurseSubmodules check
# Create upstream repos
mkdir sub.git && cd sub.git && $(GIT) init --bare
mkdir repo.git && cd repo.git && $(GIT) init --bare
# Create local repos
$(GIT) clone repo.git repo
$(GIT) clone sub.git sub
# Populate submodule
cd sub && echo "foo" > foo && $(GIT) add foo && $(GIT) commit -m 'rev 1
of foo' && $(GIT) push
# Add submodule to parent repo
cd repo && $(GIT) submodule add ../sub.git && $(GIT) commit -m 'Add
submodule' && $(GIT) push
# Track a new branch in the submodule
cd repo/sub && $(GIT) checkout -b aril && $(GIT) push -u origin aril
# Add commits to sub repo
cd repo/sub && echo "bar" > bar && $(GIT) add bar && $(GIT) commit -m
'Add bar' && $(GIT) push
cd repo/sub && echo "foo2" >> foo && $(GIT) commit -am 'Add more to
foo' && $(GIT) push
# Update parent with new submodule commits. Note: no push
cd repo && $(GIT) add sub && $(GIT) commit -m 'Update sub'
# Sub's master branch diverges
cd sub && echo "three" > three && $(GIT) add three && $(GIT) commit -m
'Add three' && $(GIT) push
# Rebase submodule: this tag is enough to keep the old commits from
being garbage collected
cd repo/sub && $(GIT) tag pre-rebase && $(GIT) push --tags origin
cd repo/sub && $(GIT) checkout master && $(GIT) pull --ff-only
cd repo/sub && $(GIT) checkout aril
cd repo/sub && $(GIT) rebase master && $(GIT) push --force-with-lease
# Update parent repo with newly rebased sub: this will FAIL due to
push.recurseSubmodules=check unable to find HEAD^'s submodule pointer in any
pushed branch in repo/sub
cd repo && $(GIT) add sub && $(GIT) commit -m 'Add rebased submodule'
&& $(GIT) push
clean:
rm -rf repo repo2 repo.git sub sub.git .gitconfig
