Error checking out different submodule commits

[pespinel]

Misc

One workflow runs on master, the submodule points to a commit. Then the same workflow runs on another branch, the submodule points to another different commit.

We are having the following error:

Checking out the ref
  /usr/bin/git checkout --progress --force -B master refs/remotes/origin/master
  Error: fatal: failed to unpack tree object c40ead345284397b4c099ecc5b5ec9586bc9d326
  Error: error: Submodule 'acceptance/resources/users_data' could not be updated.
  Error: error: Submodule 'acceptance/resources/users_data' cannot checkout new HEAD.
  Error: The process '/usr/bin/git' failed with exit code 128

Step:

- name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          submodules: 'recursive'

[hpatchett]

We are having a similar issue. Impacts self-hosted agents only.

Any time the submodule reference is changed I will have to delete the work directory under _work in order to get the checkout to be okay again.

I am working around this by doing:

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Submodule Update
        run: git submodule update --init --recursive

This seems to allow changes to the submodule whereas:

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          submodules: 'recursive'
          token: ${{ secrets.PAT }}

Does not seem to work when the submodule ref changes.

Our submodules are declared using their SSH url as they are private repos in our org. The SSH key is loaded into the self-hosted agent

Would love to see a built-in solution to this, where I can use the PAT token, which works initially, but not for subsequent changes