Git index Hanging on To Old Submodule Path?

Question

I have a repository which has two submodules. Git is complaining when I run git submodule init or git submodule update, with the following error:

fatal: no submodule mapping found in .gitmodules for path 'AppName.xcodeproj/..Vendor/AFNetworking'

My submodules were not all in the same directory, and I decided to clean up the project. I used to have a directory called Vendor which contained some of my submodules but I followed the directions here to remove the submodule from git. Then, I re-added the submodules in a new directory called submodules.

One of my submodules is the AFNetworking library, which I had added as a submodule in the initial Vendor directory. I removed it a while ago and re-added it as part of the clean up process. The app seemed to build just fine, and my git submodule commands were working correctly. Now, when I check out on a different machine, it fails as described above.

My .gitmodules file looks like this:

[submodule "submodules/AFNetworking"]
    path = submodules/AFNetworking
    url = https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking.git
[submodule "submodules/LNPopupController"]
    path = submodules/LNPopupController
    url = https://github.com/MosheBerman/LNPopupController.git

This seems normal, as git knows where my modules are, and all should be well. The same is true of my .git/config file:

[core]
    repositoryformatversion = 0
    filemode = true
    bare = false
    logallrefupdates = true
    ignorecase = true
    precomposeunicode = true
[remote "origin"]
    url = [email protected]:MosheBerman/theshmuz.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "master"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/master
[submodule "submodules/AFNetworking"]
    url = https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking.git

The error is subtle, and it took a while for me to realize it, but I noticed that the error message references the old Vendor directory, which no longer exists.

I opened ./git/index by directing the output of cat into a text file and using a text editor. Sure enough, AppName.xcodeproj/../Vendor/AFNetworking/ appears in the index. Could this be a bad gitlink? How do I clean this up so I can initialize and build my repo as normal?

Answer 1

I had tried removing the cached reference from the index from the root directory containing AppName.xcodeproj before, like so:

git rm --cached /Vendor/AFNetworking

So, I recreated the folder hierarchy and I tried adding a dummy file inside /Vendor/AFNetworking. I also tried adding a file called "AFNetworking" inside of Vendor. Adding and then removing those files didn't do the trick.

I took another look at this problem and found a blog post (link) which explained the right way to inspect the index. It turns out that my index had the weird reference to the old submodule in it:

AppName.xcodeproj/../Vendor/AFNetworking.

The solution was to remove the file with exact listing from the index, like so:

git rm --cached AppName.xcodeproj/../Vendor/AFNetworking

Then I was able to run git submodule update successfully. It looks like the index doesn't always match unix file-system relative paths, but it can be more specific in some cases. The Pro Git book had some information (in the print Chapter 9 edition, Chapter 10 online) that led me to suspect this, but it took the blog post for me to understand exactly how to open the index.