How to recursively clone submodules?

[NobodyXu]

In the latest release, I see that there are several new types related to submodule.
I read the Submodule struct, however I'm not sure how to recursively clone it.

Is it not supported yet?

[Byron]

There are a couple of operations that can be applied to submodules like 'init' or 'update' which all are not implemented yet. However, all the primitives are there to support implementing it by hand. For instance, I plan to add --recurse-submodules for gix clone, which can initially be in gitoxide-core and then move to something more general into gix from there.

[Byron]

If reset() deals with submodules, the gix will as well. The idea is to honor the various configuration variables that control how submodules are handled when fetching, for example, I just don't have an understanding yet of how that all would look like. As it's not needed for cargo though it will be a while until that is implemented though. Thus for submodule handling has to be done by hand.

[koppor]

In a discussion of on-demand installation of a git command supporting clone only, I found gitoxide. Since I need --recurse-submodules, I found this thread.

May I ask if there was progress? 😅

On Windows, I get

>C:\Users\koppor\.cargo\bin\gix.exe clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/JabRef/jabref.git JabRef
error: unexpected argument '--recurse-submodules' found

  tip: to pass '--recurse-submodules' as a value, use '-- --recurse-submodules'

Usage: gix.exe clone [OPTIONS] <REMOTE> [DIRECTORY]

For more information, try '--help'.

(I'm using gitoxide v0.44.0 (x86_64-pc-windows-msvc) installed via cargo binstall gitoxide)

[Byron]

This wasn't implemented yet, even though submodule handling does exist to enable it.

There is probably many details involved to get this right, so I'd expect this to be more involved than a simple recursive loop like one would initially assume.

[koppor]

I think, later the complexity comes from handling .gitmodules right.

[Byron]

This may be just me who assumes there will be unanticipated details, to stay vigilant during the implementation. Much seems simple at first, but usually that's due to ignorance. And right now, I am pretty ignorant as I didn't research this yet.