[hxieustc]

Problem

The gRPC clone step used git clone --recurse-submodules --shallow-submodules, which attempts to fetch the bundled third_party/abseil-cpp submodule from GitHub. This fails in environments where the abseil repo is not accessible, even though abseil is already built and installed from source earlier in the same Dockerfile (-DgRPC_ABSL_PROVIDER=package tells CMake to use it).

There were two bugs in the fix attempt:

1. git -c submodule.<path>.update=none doesn't handle slashes in subsection names — git rejects the config key and prints usage.
2. --shallow-submodules is a git clone flag only, not valid for git submodule update.

Fix

Clone gRPC without submodules, then:

1. Run git submodule init to register submodules in .git/config
2. Set submodule."third_party/abseil-cpp".update = none via git config (the correct way to handle paths with slashes)
3. Run git submodule update --recursive --depth 1 — abseil is skipped, all other submodules (e.g. protobuf) are fetched normally

Test

Full bash ./build.sh succeeds and produces nixlbench:v1.3.1.dev..

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