Another tip: you can do a deep clone of the main repo, then do `git submodule update --init --recursive --depth=1` to just pull the heads of your dependencies to cut down on times. Especially useful if you don't work within the submodules at all.

I can't for the life of me understand why this isn't at least a config option. That and an option for setting --upstream in git push by default. Those could at least preserve backwards compatibility.

Are the Git maintainers so stringent on maintaining backwards compatibility that the implementation of submodules has remained in such a dire state for so long? I find it hard to believe that a VCS this widely adopted would fall over so easily for this relatively popular use case.

At the very least, it could warn you when you pull a repo with submodules without —recurse-submodules. But it doesn’t, it just silently does nothing.