Can't rmdir when switching between branches with submodules in SourceTree on Windows

[Ryan Masterson]

Hello,

I have a repo with two branches. The 'master' branch does not have any submodules. The other branch ('revamp') has two submodules in it ('awesome' and 'bootstrap'). In SourceTree on Windows 7, when I switch to the branch that does not have submodules, I receive the following error:

git -c diff.mnemonicprefix=false -c core.quotepath=false checkout master
warning: unable to rmdir vendor/awesome: Directory not empty
warning: unable to rmdir vendor/bootstrap: Directory not empty
Switched to branch 'master'

git -c diff.mnemonicprefix=false -c core.quotepath=false submodule update --init --recursive
Completed successfully.

This problem does not happen to my colleagues using SourceTree on Mac. Also I get the same error trying to use the command line 'git checkout -f master' as well. So I think it's related to Windows.

Can anyone help?

[stevestreeting · Accepted solution]

Technically this is a warning rather than an error, the actions you're performing are still succeeding.

This Stack Overflow post has a good description of the reason why switching between branches with different submodules can cause problems, and what you can do about it: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6553743/switching-between-branches-where-a-subdirectory-was-in-the-main-repo-vs-submodu