TIL you can stop Git/VSC from staging submodule changes

[MightyTheArmiddilo]

I noticed that a lot of contributors of all skill levels suffer accidentally from making pull requests that edit both the main repo and a submodule. When using a command/shortcut to stage all changes, this includes changes to submodules (especially when it comes to someone forking the submodule and directing their local assets repo there). This creates unnecessary merge conflicts that could probably drive a newer contributor's sanity into the ground if they aren't experienced with submodules. According to the .gitmodules documentation, submodules have an "ignore" field with three different parameters:

submodule.<name>.ignore

Defines under what circumstances git status and the diff family show a submodule as modified. The following values are supported:

all

    The submodule will never be considered modified (but will nonetheless show up in the output of status and commit when it has been staged).
dirty

    All changes to the submodule’s work tree will be ignored, only committed differences between the HEAD of the submodule and its recorded state in the superproject are taken into account.
untracked

    Only untracked files in submodules will be ignored. Committed differences and modifications to tracked files will show up.
none

    No modifications to submodules are ignored, all of committed differences, and modifications to tracked and untracked files are shown. This is the default option.

If this option is also present in the submodule’s entry in .git/config of the superproject, the setting there will override the one found in .gitmodules.

Both settings can be overridden on the command line by using the --ignore-submodules option. The git submodule commands are not affected by this setting.

(why is most of the quote in a code block-)


As an example, the .gitmodules file could go like:

[submodule "assets"]
	path = assets
	url = https://github.com/FunkinCrew/Funkin.assets
	ignore = dirty (or all)
[submodule "art"]
	path = art
	url = https://github.com/FunkinCrew/Funkin.art
	ignore = dirty (or all)

I have yet to test a majority of this myself, but adding an ignore field with say dirty to .gitmodules caused any changes to a submodule to be ignored in VSC's Source Control, while still giving me the option to stage and push commits to the submodule's repository as well.

[TechnikTil]

say that again...