Feature request: Equivalent of git push --recurse-submodules=check to verify submodules have no unpushed or uncommitted changes

[radomirbrkic]

Is there a way in Gitman to verify that all submodules (gitman.yml dependencies) are fully pushed and consistent with their remotes, similar to git push --recurse-submodules=check?
It would be useful to have a command like "gitman subrepo check" returning 0/1 exit code for scripting pre-push hooks.
Reference: "Git Submodules - Publishing" (https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules#_publishing_submodules)

Read attached file for full explanation.

full-issue-text.md

[jacebrowning]

Good idea! I'm thinking this could be another option to gitman list. We already have gitman list --fail-if-dirty to check for uncommitted changes, so maybe something like gitman list --fail-if-stale could do the same for checking the remote state?

[radomirbrkic]

Sorry for late answer. When you do git checkout <hash> in your parent repo, gitman install is not autommatically run and that other parent commit won't have its dependency required by gitman.yml so build won't compile or will give undesired behaviour.

Back in the old days of submodules before --recursive flag existed, people used to put git submodule --init update --recursive as pre build step to make sure each build has required gitlink/dependency version. For that reason, you could add gitman install || true (notice intended absence of --force) in your pre build step of your project (I assume that every build system has some pre build step: .csproj, cmake, make, maven, ...) and when you do git checkout <hash> in your parent repo (there is no git checkout --recursive since we are not talking about submodules and I am writing this as workaround idea), there can be 2 cases:

1. there are no local changes in dependency directory and dependency commit is pushed to its remote:

dependency gets installed (gitman overrides content of dependency directory since there are no local changes)
and your dependency version is correct.

2. there are local changes in dependency directory or dependency commit is unpushed:

gitman install fails and it may return false (it probably doesn't since commit exists).
gitman install should natively report:

"You are using dependency commit which is unpushed commit or has local changes"

|| true is here to make sure that pre build step always returns true so your project always gets built
whenever you run dotnet build, make or whatever is the command for building project.

Key thing here is that gitman install is designed to work even if commit is unpushed or has local changes
but user should always get notified if that is not the case.

[jacebrowning]

So are you looking for gitman install --skip-changes to expand to check for unpushed changes we well, another flag like --skip-unpushed, or some new default behavior?