Daniel James wrote:
I've had no problem dealing with the numeric modules. The output of 'git config -f .gitmodules -l' contains pretty much everything you need to know.
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If you're trying to find modules by walking the filesystem, you'll just create problems for yourself.
Walking the filesystem produces better results in the following cases: - when you have manually placed a (proposed) library in libs/ that is not yet a submodule - when you have a Boost directory structure that has no Git metadata - or when you have a Boost directory that doesn't have all the libraries in libs/ but just a subset It's convenient for tools to be able to handle these cases and to not be limited to what .gitmodules says. (At other times it can indeed be convenient for tools to look at .gitmodules and not the filesystem, but such is life.) If we're going to make modular/subset releases work, it would indeed be beneficial for all tools to look at libs/* and "just work" on whatever is there. I'd argue that it would even be necessary. We could use a separate manifest file to avoid looking at libs/* just to be contrary, but I see no point in doing so.