issue: fetch will give a fatal error once when a new arbitrary branch on the remote contains a submodule url change with updated sha This was an issue I originally opened on git-for-windows a while back. (https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/issues/3404) But it's actually reproducible on Linux Seems to be a regression since I could not repro on version 1.9 Issue still present on version 2.45.0.31.gd4cc1ec35f Local repro steps (complete test script attached) - create repo A with a commit on master - create repo B with a commit on master - create repo X and add a submodule S1 pointing to A, commit to master. - clone repo X with submodules to repo Z - in repo X, create branch X1 from master. Change submodule S1 url to repo B and commit on X1. - in repo Z, fetch and notice the fatal error "upload-pack: not our ref SHA" From there, you can then quickly repro the error like so: - in repo Z , delete branch origin/X1 and then fetch again. Current workaround is to set submodule.recurse to false -- Martin