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Comment by jawngee | Hacker News Reader

I swear I must be the only person in the world that has no problems using submodules and I use them constantly. It puzzles me that people have such problems with it, which I guess illustrates how unreliable anecdotal evidence really is.

I've had detached head issues, but nothing that didn't take a minute or two to solve.

It might be that I'm using SourceTree exclusively, so maybe SourceTree is hiding away the painful bits or something.

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If you are using submodules for pinning external resources to a specific hash then you probably won't have problems. If you are using them to manage multiple internal resources with varying levels of coupling...you will.

I'd guess you aren't working on a team, and don't check out commits before your submodules were added?

If you don't roll forward and back in time (bisect), and you don't have merge conflicts, and you can easily resolve abandoned commits on submodules (i.e. you don't have to wait for Bangalore to wake up and push their changes) then, yes, you probably won't have many issues.

Same here on both counts - have been using ST as my main git interface since 2011 (I still use command line for git init, reflog, and checking stuff remotely on VMs, and git bfg if someone committed a credential), and using submodules across a wide variety of projects. I've never had a problem, and only avoid subtrees to be nice to my colleagues that have had problems

which I guess illustrates how unreliable anecdotal evidence really is.

Or, maybe your use case skirts around the problems?

I think you're both saying the same thing.

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