Hey @JeffreyBenjaminBrown - is it possible you have restrictive network settings? The submodules that are all failing for you are using the git protocol which is frequently blocked in restrictive/corporate settings. See [1] [2] [3]

[1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The-Protocols
[2] https://gist.github.com/grawity/4392747
[3] https://github.com/supercollider/supercollider/blob/develop/.gitmodules

My OS is a vanilla KUbuntu (KDE + Ubuntu) 18.04, on my home laptop. I've never messed with network settings beyond adding Wifi networks. When you say network settings, you're not talking about my Git setup, correct? I just dug into my System Settings and I don't even see anything particularly "secure" about it -- the firewall is off, and that's the only obvious access-restriction option.

Would restrictive settings have the effect that some repos download recursively with no complaint while others don't, and the ones that don't can still be cloned without complaint?

Is there any reason not to just clone each of the submodules by hand?

You were right, it was the network. My computer was fine but my router seems to have something firewalled. I didn't fix the router, but I instead (inspired by this issue) I connected through my phone, and the download worked.

And to answer my previous question,

Is there any reason not to just clone each of the submodules by hand?

I tried that and it sucked pretty hard. There are submodules in more places than external_libraries/, and it takes more than just downloading them to the right place; there's some kind of linking that you'd have to forge too, which I didn't understand.

Hey @JeffreyBenjaminBrown - is it possible you have restrictive network settings? The submodules that are all failing for you are using the git protocol which is frequently blocked in restrictive/corporate settings. See [1] [2] [3]

[1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The-Protocols [2] https://gist.github.com/grawity/4392747 [3] https://github.com/supercollider/supercollider/blob/develop/.gitmodules

For anyone struggling to clone submodules, this is what fixed it for me. In my case, the problem was that my machine wasn't cloning repos through git:// protocol, and some submodules were configured to be cloned using this protocol on .gitmodules file

The solution was to force git to always replace git:// on the urls by https://, using the following command:

git config --global url."https://".insteadOf git://

@berteodosio thanks for the comment. Just FYI - we had a number of submodules that were using git://, but this was fixed in develop in January 2022 and in main and 3.12 branches in April 2022 - it shouldn't be an issue anymore, I think.