So with Thanh's recommendation what we should be doing is as follows:
- Clone autorelease
- Checkout to the branch in .gitmodule (ex: yangtool may have a diff branch which is not master)
- Pull the latest from HEAD for each project before start to build AR
askb I hope you don't mind make taking this since it looks like it's not being worked on.
Proposed patch works and is a very minimal code to implement however we need git 2.10+ for branch "." support. 
zxiiro as discussed on this thread, I thought you suggested not to use `git submodule update --remote`. Now you seem to be using this?
https://lists.opendaylight.org/pipermail/release/2018-August/015844.html
askb Right. We need a separate job to provide the update it shouldn't be done as part of the release job.
I updated the patch so that it's run as a separate job. Ubunu 16.04 seems to also have an insufficient version of Git. We might be able to make this work when we get Ubunu 18.04 so we'll have to revisit the patch when that's available to us.
Ubuntu 16.04's git version 2.7.4
I think we're done here.