A BYU CocoaHeads club member recently posted to our google group that she’s been having problems with Git and submodules. There were some great responses, suggestions, and tips, and this is my take on Git submodules.

I’ve had some frustrations with submodules, git, and team projects. Now, whenever installing a third-party framework that has supports submodule installation I generally tend to skip that part, download the most recent stable source code, put it in my git repo, and install it w/o using any submodules. This also gives me the ability to update to new versions more selectively, which I prefer… one reason being that by default some of those submodules may be pointing at active development branches rather than stable, production quality/tested code. If you simply copy and paste their installation commands, later on you might get some buggy code when you update. Of course if you’re careful and read through the changesets before you update, double check the submodule branch is what you want, etc, submodules can be really helpful. I just got burned a couple times when I was starting out with git and since then my personal git workflow has progressed w/o using them for the most part.