poetry has issues when adding git repositories with recursive submodules, when they are optional or private

• Poetry version: 1.7.1
• Python version: 3.10.12
• OS version and name: ubuntu 23.10
• pyproject.toml: not relevant, fresh, out-of-the-box has the same problem.

• I am on the latest stable Poetry version, installed using a recommended method.
• I have searched the issues of this repo and believe that this is not a duplicate.
• I have consulted the FAQ and blog for any relevant entries or release notes.
• If an exception occurs when executing a command, I executed it again in debug mode (-vvv option) and have included the output below.

Issue

Poetry automatically does a recursive clone on sub-modules of a git repository. In some situations, this is not the desired behavior.

I have a two projects with the this problem.

First one:

• main repo
  • sub-module with a lot of training data

Example: github.com/xyntopia/pydoxtools:

So when doing:

poetry add git+https://github.com/xyntopia/pydoxtools.git

You will get errors which are also misleading, because they don't give you any hint that the "Repository not found" refers to a submodule and not the repository itself.

Repository not found.

because the submodule is not uploaded on github but somewhere else (the submodule has a relative path).

The module installs without any problems, when using pip:

pip install "git+https://github.com/xyntopia/pydoxtools.git"

Now, I consider the sub-module optional, as it contains a large dataset and shouldn't be downloaded automatically.

Second one:

• main repo
  • plugins
    • plugin one
    • plugin from a private repository

so both repos work without cloning the sub-modules recursively. in fact it breaks the installation, because it can't download them with the right permissions or other things.

Proposal

Add a flag which turns off the default recursive-download, or some pass-through "args" command, which can pass through flags to git. I would add it myself somewhere here:

def clone(self, repository: str, dest: Path) -> str:

just don't know where to collect and pass the flags to this function...

Start with poetry-core/src/poetry/core/vcs/git.py at the clone(repository: str, dest: Path) entry point. Reproduce with the pydoxtools repository and a repository containing optional or private submodules, comparing Poetry's behavior with pip. Done means the requested installation no longer fails solely because recursive submodules cannot be fetched, and any resulting error identifies the relevant submodule.