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

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?

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).

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 <file>..." to unstage)
(use "git add <file>..." to mark resolution)

So I just did this

git reset HEAD linux

Got help from this discussion. In my case the

git reset HEAD subby
git commit

worked for me :)

If you want to use the upstream version:

rm -rf <submodule dir>
git submodule init
git submodule update

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.

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.

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:

1. Run git status - make a note of the submodule folder with conflicts

2. Reset the submodule to the version that was last committed in the current branch:

   git reset HEAD path/to/submodule

3. 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

4. And now you can commit that and get back to work.