git-sparse-checkout: clarify interactions with submodules

Ignoring the sparse-checkout feature momentarily, if one has a submodule and
creates local branches within it with unpushed changes and maybe adds some
untracked files to it, then we would want to avoid accidentally removing such
a submodule.  So, for example with git.git, if you run
   git checkout v2.13.0
then the sha1collisiondetection/ submodule is NOT removed even though it
did not exist as a submodule until v2.14.0.  Similarly, if you only had
v2.13.0 checked out previously and ran
   git checkout v2.14.0
the sha1collisiondetection/ submodule would NOT be automatically
initialized despite being part of v2.14.0.  In both cases, git requires
submodules to be initialized or deinitialized separately.  Further, we
also have special handling for submodules in other commands such as
clean, which requires two --force flags to delete untracked submodules,
and some commands have a --recurse-submodules flag.

sparse-checkout is very similar to checkout, as evidenced by the similar
name -- it adds and removes files from the working copy.  However, for
the same avoid-data-loss reasons we do not want to remove a submodule
from the working copy with checkout, we do not want to do it with
sparse-checkout either.  So submodules need to be separately initialized
or deinitialized; changing sparse-checkout rules should not
automatically trigger the removal or vivification of submodules.

I believe the previous wording in git-sparse-checkout.txt about
submodules was only about this particular issue.  Unfortunately, the
previous wording could be interpreted to imply that submodules should be
considered active regardless of sparsity patterns.  Update the wording
to avoid making such an implication.  It may be helpful to consider two
example situations where the differences in wording become important:

In the future, we want users to be able to run commands like
   git clone --sparse=moduleA --recurse-submodules $REPO_URL
and have sparsity paths automatically set up and have submodules *within
the sparsity paths* be automatically initialized.  We do not want all
submodules in any path to be automatically initialized with that
command.

Similarly, we want to be able to do things like
   git -c sparse.restrictCmds grep --recurse-submodules $REV $PATTERN
and search through $REV for $PATTERN within the recorded sparsity
patterns.  We want it to recurse into submodules within those sparsity
patterns, but do not want to recurse into directories that do not match
the sparsity patterns in search of a possible submodule.

Signed-off-by: Elijah Newren <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Derrick Stolee <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <[email protected]>

Author: newren

Documentation/git-sparse-checkout.txt

@@ -190,10 +190,32 @@ directory.
 SUBMODULES
 ----------
 
-If your repository contains one or more submodules, then those submodules will
-appear based on which you initialized with the `git submodule` command. If
-your sparse-checkout patterns exclude an initialized submodule, then that
-submodule will still appear in your working directory.
+If your repository contains one or more submodules, then submodules
+are populated based on interactions with the `git submodule` command.
+Specifically, `git submodule init -- <path>` will ensure the submodule
+at `<path>` is present, while `git submodule deinit [-f] -- <path>`
+will remove the files for the submodule at `<path>` (including any
+untracked files, uncommitted changes, and unpushed history).  Similar
+to how sparse-checkout removes files from the working tree but still
+leaves entries in the index, deinitialized submodules are removed from
+the working directory but still have an entry in the index.
+
+Since submodules may have unpushed changes or untracked files,
+removing them could result in data loss.  Thus, changing sparse
+inclusion/exclusion rules will not cause an already checked out
+submodule to be removed from the working copy.  Said another way, just
+as `checkout` will not cause submodules to be automatically removed or
+initialized even when switching between branches that remove or add
+submodules, using `sparse-checkout` to reduce or expand the scope of
+"interesting" files will not cause submodules to be automatically
+deinitialized or initialized either.
+
+Further, the above facts mean that there are multiple reasons that
+"tracked" files might not be present in the working copy: sparsity
+pattern application from sparse-checkout, and submodule initialization
+state.  Thus, commands like `git grep` that work on tracked files in
+the working copy may return results that are limited by either or both
+of these restrictions.
 
 
 SEE ALSO