Remove submodule completely from your git repository

I have a project that uses git submodules in the past then they are removed long time ago, no-one had problem but I’ve noticed that Visual Studio had some strange warning during the build.

1

warning : Could not find a part of the path 'C:\develop\xxx\submodules\jarvis.catalog\.git'. The source code won't be available via Source Link.

It seems that Visual Studio Integration with Git still found information on submodules and tried to check something in corresponding folders. I’m not sure that this warning was present since we removed the submodule, it seems more that some settings changed, but nevertheless we still have some information in our repository pointing to old, not used anymore submodules..

Talking to other developers they told me that they already saw the warning but since no problem arise they simply did not investigate further. My problem is that we have lots of this warning in local build, and maybe the build slows down due to these failing check for directories in file system.

Checking logs of Azure DevOps pipeline I did not find anyone of these warning, so it seems that is something specific of my machine/configuration.

Checking the repository I still found a .gitmodules files with all configuration in the repository that survived our cleanup of the repository. No-one noticed this problem because everything just work without submodule init etc, but Visual Studio and potentially other tools, checking the presence of the file performs some check or other stuff during build/usage and maybe the build is made slower due to these failed check of directories.

As a rule of thumb, if you remove / change some submodule configuration, always check your .gitmodules file for leftovers.

Removing the file completely removed the warning.

Gian Maria.