The Utilities/cmcurl directory contains a reduced distribution of the curl source tree with only the library source code and CMake build system. It is not a submodule; the actual content is part of our source tree and changes can be made and committed directly. We update from upstream using Git's "subtree" merge strategy. A special branch contains commits of upstream curl snapshots and nothing else. No Git ref points explicitly to the head of this branch, but it is merged into our history. Update curl from upstream as follows. Create a local branch to explicitly reference the upstream snapshot branch head: git branch curl-upstream 3fe5d9bf Use a temporary directory to checkout the branch: mkdir curl-tmp cd curl-tmp git init git pull .. curl-upstream rm -rf * Now place the (reduced) curl content in this directory. See instructions shown by git log 3fe5d9bf for help extracting the content from the upstream repo. Then run the following commands to commit the new version. Substitute the appropriate date and version number: git add --all GIT_AUTHOR_NAME='Curl Upstream' \ GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL='curl-library@cool.haxx.se' \ GIT_AUTHOR_DATE='Wed Sep 10 08:07:58 2014 +0200' \ git commit -m 'curl 7.38.0 (reduced)' && git commit --amend Edit the commit message to describe the procedure used to obtain the content. Then push the changes back up to the main local repository: git push .. HEAD:curl-upstream cd .. rm -rf curl-tmp Create a topic in the main repository on which to perform the update: git checkout -b update-curl master Merge the curl-upstream branch as a subtree: git merge -s recursive -X subtree=Utilities/cmcurl \ curl-upstream If there are conflicts, resolve them and commit. Build and test the tree. Commit any additional changes needed to succeed. Finally, run git rev-parse --short=8 curl-upstream to get the commit from which the curl-upstream branch must be started on the next update. Edit the "git branch curl-upstream" line above to record it, and commit this file.