commit c033a2f62dda774de8cccc83b7f1918377995d6c
author Prathamesh Chavan <pc44800@gmail.com> Tue May 08 17:29:49 2018 -0700
committer Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> Wed May 09 12:37:00 2018 +0900
tree 3f7723b2d6800286553045eae10ed6e08331562d
parent ccdcbd54c4475c2238b310f7113ab3075b5abc9c

submodule foreach: correct '$path' in nested submodules from a subdirectory

When running 'git submodule foreach --recursive' from a subdirectory of
your repository, nested submodules get a bogus value for $path:
For a submodule 'sub' that contains a nested submodule 'nested',
running 'git -C dir submodule foreach echo $path' from the root of the
superproject would report path='../nested' for the nested submodule.
The first part '../' is derived from the logic computing the relative
path from $pwd to the root of the superproject. The second part is the
submodule path inside the submodule. This value is of little use and is
hard to document.

Also, in git-submodule.txt, $path is documented to be the "name of the
submodule directory relative to the superproject", but "the
superproject" is ambiguous.

To resolve both these issues, we could:
(a) Change "the superproject" to "its immediate superproject", so
    $path would be "nested" instead of "../nested".
(b) Change "the superproject" to "the superproject the original
    command was run from", so $path would be "sub/nested" instead of
    "../nested".
(c) Change "the superproject" to "the directory the original command
    was run from", so $path would be "../sub/nested" instead of
    "../nested".

The behavior for (c) was attempted to be introduced in 091a6eb0fe
(submodule: drop the top-level requirement, 2013-06-16) with the intent
for $path to be relative from $pwd to the submodule worktree, but that
did not work for nested submodules, as the intermittent submodules
were not included in the path.

If we were to fix the meaning of the $path using (a), we would break
any existing submodule user that runs foreach from non-root of the
superproject as the non-nested submodule '../sub' would change its
path to 'sub'.

If we were to fix the meaning of $path using (b), then we would break
any user that uses nested submodules (even from the root directory)
as the 'nested' would become 'sub/nested'.

If we were to fix the meaning of $path using (c), then we would break
the same users as in (b) as 'nested' would become 'sub/nested' from
the root directory of the superproject.

All groups can be found in the wild.  The author has no data if one group
outweighs the other by large margin, and offending each one seems equally
bad at first.  However in the authors imagination it is better to go with
(a) as running from a sub directory sounds like it is carried out by a
human rather than by some automation task.  With a human on the keyboard
the feedback loop is short and the changed behavior can be adapted to
quickly unlike some automation that can break silently.

Discussed-with: Ramsay Jones <ramsay@ramsayjones.plus.com>
Signed-off-by: Prathamesh Chavan <pc44800@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Signed-off-by: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>