subrepos: recursive status/diff with ui.commitsubrepos=True

[David.Sedlock at lantiq.com]

Hi everybody,

We (Lantiq) would like to have an option to turn on recursive subrepo behavior. A good name for the option would be "recursesubrepos" though we could live with "commitsubrepos".

We might agree with the statement "In general, we shouldn't put any major behavior changes under config settings", but would still argue that we are dealing with two systematically different usage models and having a convenient way to switch the non-default model on would be valuable.

The option would be purely a user convenience (saves adding --subrepos all the time) and, in the transitional period leading up to full support for subrepos, would be clearly documented as USER BEWARE. Given that the default behavior is now clearly non-recursive (which wasn't clear before), and that the user goes against this with an explicit choice, we don't see that problems arising from the use of commands that do not yet support subrepos together with those that do is a decisive objection.

Regards,
David