[nonbirithm]

I can't for the life of me understand why this isn't at least a config option. That and an option for setting --upstream in git push by default. Those could at least preserve backwards compatibility.

Are the Git maintainers so stringent on maintaining backwards compatibility that the implementation of submodules has remained in such a dire state for so long? I find it hard to believe that a VCS this widely adopted would fall over so easily for this relatively popular use case.

[jayd16]

You can now set it for pull but not for clone.

    git config --global submodule.recurse true