Add Submodule with Putty key

By ch...@brass9.com on May 15, 2013 02:50 (imported from Google Code)

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This is a request for enhancement to the Add Submodule flow.

1. Why not call it "Add Submodule" instead of "Submodule Add"? Just reads more grammatically.

2. The dialog has 2 inputs:

Repository:

Path:

This is a pretty confusing dialog, and I'm not sure what use case it would suit.

First, the Repository input is expecting a git repo URI, but has a ... button next to it which takes you to a Windows Explorer window to browse folders. This is definitely misleading for users who don't know how to work this dialog, and not helpful to users who do.

Let's take an example use case:

I use bitbucket, and bitbucket uses Putty keys to authorize you pulling and pushing from their private repos (github does the same). So, my submodules require a repository path, and a Putty key. Since this dialog doesn't support a Putty key, it's not possible to just enter the repo and path you want the submodule to drop into - TortoiseGit is going to fail to auth with bitbucket and cancel the entire operation immediately.

So, instead I clone the submodule repo into the relevant path first, copy its origin, then paste that into this dialog for Repo, and enter the path. So for this use case, the Repository input isn't necessary, or if it remains it should really just be picked up from the existing git repo automatically.

In fact, it's probably best to just delegate all the repo setup for the submodules to those submodules, meaning all this dialog should have is a Path input. It probably also doesn't make sense to Pull after finishing this dialog, since that's also best delegated to the existing TortoiseGit functionality around pull/push which works just fine in submodule folders.