installing from git(hub) with submodules

[tidy-bot]

Issue by jonkeane
Thursday Apr 28, 2016 at 23:38 GMT
Originally opened as r-lib/devtools#1163

---

Currently git(hub) repositories with submodules can't be installed. There is a warning when using install_github(), but after the switch to git2r it looks like args="--recursive" are no longer supported in install_git().

I've looked through git2r and I don't see any support for submodules there, but I might be missing it somewhere.

Would it be possible (and more importantly advisable) to add an option to check for a .gitmodules file when the repository is downloaded and then also download the submodules specified there before installing the package? I would be happy to take a stab at adding this and sending a pull request, but I want to make sure this isn't a terrible idea first.

This is an off shoot from Issue #751

[tidy-bot]

Comment by hadley
Thursday Jun 02, 2016 at 13:51 GMT

---

Yeah, I think that's a reasonable thing to add

[tidy-bot]

Comment by vspinu
Sunday May 07, 2017 at 15:05 GMT

---

@jonkeane, have you dug into this further? It's quite a headache I must say.

[tidy-bot]

Comment by jonkeane
Monday May 08, 2017 at 13:52 GMT

---

I haven't looked at this since I sent the PR. If you check out the code at that point it should work, but let me know if there are any problems and I'll see what I can do to fix them.

[tidy-bot]

Comment by jimhester
Monday May 08, 2017 at 14:22 GMT

---

Also a workaround with CRAN devtools is to use something like the following r-lib/devtools#751 (comment)

[tidy-bot]

Comment by rtobar
Friday May 26, 2017 at 01:48 GMT

---

I'm also eager to see these changes included in devtools. Thus, I rebased @jonkeane's patch on top of the current master, and added a small improvement on top of it. I commented on the original pull request about this to know whether I should create a new one or if we can reuse it to include my changes as well.