How do I manage conflicts with git submodules

Question

I have a git superproject that references several submodules and I am trying to lock down a workflow for the rest of the my project members to work within   For this question  lets say my superproject is called supery and the submodule is called subby   Then is a simplification of what I m trying to do   I m not actually using the branches for versions  but I thought it would be easiest to lay out as a question    My master branch of supery has the tag v1 0 of the git project subby referenced as a submodule  The branch of supery called one one and changed the reference of the submodule to point to the tag v1 1 of subby   I can work  within each of these branches without a hitch  but if I try to update the one one branch with changes from the master branch I receive some conflicts and I don t how to resolve them   Basically after running a git pull   master while in the subby branch  it looks like it creates additional submodules   Before the pull merge  I get the desired response from git submodule from the one one branch     git checkout master   git submodule qw3rty   321e subby  v1 0    git checkout one one   git submodule asdfgh   456d subby  v1 1    But after the pull  it adds additional submodules when I run git submodule     git pull   master Auto-merged schema CONFLICT  submodule   Merge conflict in subby - needs qu3rty   321e Automatic merge failed  fix conflicts and then commit the results     git submodule qw3rty   321e subby  v1 0  asdfgh   456d subby  v1 1  zxcvbn   7890 subby  v1 1 1    How do I delete ignore the unwanted submodule references and commit my conflicts and changes  Or is there a parameter I can use with my original git pull that will ignore my submodules

User · Accepted Answer

I have not seen that exact error before  But I have a guess about the trouble you are encountering  It looks like because the master and one one branches of supery contain different refs for the subby submodule  when you merge changes from master git does not know which ref - v1 0 or v1 1 - should be kept and tracked by the one one branch of supery   If that is the case  then you need to select the ref that you want and commit that change to resolve the conflict  Which is exactly what you are doing with the reset command   This is a tricky aspect of tracking different versions of a submodule in different branches of your project  But the submodule ref is just like any other component of your project  If the two different branches continue to track the same respective submodule refs after successive merges  then git should be able to work out the pattern without raising merge conflicts in future merges  On the other hand you if switch submodule refs frequently you may have to put up with a lot of conflict resolving

User · Answer

Well  its not technically managing conflicts with submodules  ie  keep this but not that   but I found a way to continue working   and all I had to do was pay attention to my git status output and reset the submodules   git reset HEAD subby git commit   That would reset the submodule to the pre-pull commit  Which in this case is exactly what I wanted  And in other cases where I need the changes applied to the submodule  I ll handle those with the standard submodule workflows  checkout master  pull down the desired tag  etc

User · Answer

First  find the hash you want to your submodule to reference   then run    supery subby   git co hashpointerhere   supery subby   cd       supery   git add subby   supery   git commit -m  updated subby reference    that has worked for me to get my submodule to the correct hash reference and continue on with my work without getting any further conflicts

User · Answer

I had this problem with git rebase -i origin master to a branch    I wanted to take master s version of the submodule ref  so I simply did   git reset master path to submodule  and then  git rebase --continue   That solved the problem for me

User · Answer

If you want to use the upstream version  rm -rf  lt submodule dir gt  git submodule init git submodule update

User · Answer

I struggled a bit with the answers on this question and didn t have much luck with the answers in a similar SO post either  So this is what worked for me - bearing in mind that in my case  the submodule was maintained by a different team  so the conflict came from different submodule versions in master and my local branch of the project I was working on    Run git status - make a note of the submodule folder with conflicts Reset the submodule to the version that was last committed in the current branch   git reset HEAD path to submodule At this point  you have a conflict-free version of your submodule which you can now update to the latest version in the submodule s repository   cd path to submodule git submodule foreach git pull origin SUBMODULE-BRANCH-NAME And now you can commit that and get back to work

User · Answer

Well In my parent directory I see     git status On branch master Your branch is up-to-date with  origin master   Unmerged paths   use  git reset HEAD  lt file gt      to unstage   use  git add  lt file gt      to mark resolution    So I just did this  git reset HEAD linux

User · Answer

Got help from this discussion  In my case the  git reset HEAD subby git commit   worked for me

[git] How do I manage conflicts with git submodules?

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