I've never thought of doing commits in submodules. We use them a lot at work but only in a "import a specific revision of this other repo into our repo" sense, if we needed to make changes we would do them in the repo that the submodule points to and then just update the ref that the submodule points to.
What's your use case for making and committing changes inside the submodule tree?
I naively thought that was the whole point of sub modules. Otherwise why not use a package manager?
The use case being that you can work on and update some independent system/repo while getting real-time feedback on how the changes interact with the system as a whole.
That's how I've come to use git submodules. It's been helpful when working with various embedded projects. They often don't get updated for months or years (ideally), and then you only want to pull in specific changes.
In a previous project we had a main repo that had the deploy/orchestration scripts, docs, etc and the actual components (frontend, backend, periodic and ondemand jobs and jobqueue, blob serving thing that did ACL in front of Ceph - because for some reason S3 was too mainstream :D)
doing a quick fix that changed an API and had to be done in backend and frontend and in the main.
though it's quite similar to todays gitops flow, but with submodules :)
It's easy to overlook that the submodule is a complete git repository in its own right.
When working on both, it's really annoying to have to commit to a dependency's repo, push, and pull down in the dependent repo. If you do the commit in the submodule, it's just immediately available...and you can still have whatever remote to push to. So it just cuts down on the number of checkouts you have to have.
That's all true, but work trees are cheap, and the workflow you describe means that your submodules are tracking a branch rather than pinned to a revision, right?
For our purpose that's definitely worse; the submodule is supposed to be a pointer to a specific tree, with that tree being the same for all developers. If we want to change the tree that is pointed to, we should commit and push a change to the submodule ref.
I've never thought of doing commits in submodules. We use them a lot at work but only in a "import a specific revision of this other repo into our repo" sense, if we needed to make changes we would do them in the repo that the submodule points to and then just update the ref that the submodule points to.
What's your use case for making and committing changes inside the submodule tree?