Why doesn't `git checkout` automatically do `git submodule update --recursive`? [duplicate]

Answer 1

You basically want git to do all operations recursively and automatically for all submodules. Which is probably trivial in a centralized client-server model like svn.

But git is distributed. Your submodule may come from a totally different URL, with a totally different protocol. Most probably you don't event have push access to the submodule's origin repo, while you do for the main repo.

So there cannot be a recursive push.

Therefore the designers probably decided to avoid automatic recursion for submodules everywhere. Which is consistent, but a huge amount of pain.

So much so, that in a certain project we completely abandoned them and used subtree merges instead.

Answer 2

Simplify your shortcut/aliases by using :

alias checkitout='git checkout $1; git submodule update --recursive'

Answer 3

It sounds like what you want to do can be achieved from git v2.13 on with the new --recurse-submodules option of git checkout. From the git-checkout manual page:

--[no-]recurse-submodules

Using --recurse-submodules will update the content of all initialized submodules according to the commit recorded in the superproject. If local modifications in a submodule would be overwritten the checkout will fail unless -f is used. If nothing (or --no-recurse-submodules) is used, the work trees of submodules will not be updated.

See also this relevant git mailing list message about that new option.