Comment 31 for bug 402814

as a workaround, i used `git filter-branch` to remove the submodules from the project -- of course, this only works if the submodules are purely optional or otherwise not relevant to the purposes intended (in my case, i need the branch to build daily packages; upstreams might keep library dependencies in a subtree to build and ship them, while in debian/ubuntu, this is patched out anyway to use package dependencies).

the very line i used for filtering was

  git filter-branch -f --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch .gitmodules libraries/MCAD'

(libraries/MCAD is the only submodule i had). for reference, this affects the lp:openscad project.