GitLab - Strange Icon and Entry after corrupt commit

Question

I tried to find a description for the following gitlab entry in my repo (in files-view):

I believe this file was corrupted because I had 'nested' git repos, or better, more than one .git file in the tree (If that makes even sense).

But to be honest, I didn't even know what to google for :P Then I scanned quickly through the reponses here on stackoverflow but I didn't see it either. Can somebody please either tell me where I can find a description of those or tell me what it means? I am not sure if deleting this will cause the rest of the repo to corrupt or some other knock-on effect. GitLab version is 6.2.4.

Thanks in advance,

Michael

Answer 1

It is a git submodule, and you can type:

git ls-tree HEAD -- ws-dom-full

You will see a gitlink, that is a special entry in the index which records the sha1 of the submodule repo. (Mode 160000)

When you clone the parent repo, that folder is empty.
You need:

git submodule update --init

And you will see the submodule content then.

To remove a submodule (from the index and the disk):

git submodule deinit -- ws-dom-full
git rm -- ws-dom-full
git add -u .
git commit -m "Remove ws-dom-full submodule"
git push

Answer 2

In my case this turned out to be caused by a colleague that had mistakenly cloned one Git repository within the top level of another (because of the admittedly confusing top level that consisted of only a -redundant- directory with the same name as the repository).

The resulting directory layout was like this:

.git
art
  .git
  …
documentatie
  …

For some reason the ‘art’ directory’s contents were never pushed (because of this specific layout?), so after locally cloning the ‘documentatie’ repository, one would end up with an empty ‘art’ sub-directory.