I am not saying using submodules is inconvenient, I am just saying that we should not require it if user won't build extras. Personally I almost never run this command because I don't usually compile tokudb on my laptop. When tokudb had issues with compiling on OS X, I simply put -DWITHOUT_TOKUDB=1 to my build script. It is saving some time for me every time I issue clean build as well.
I am not saying using submodules is inconvenient, I am just saying that we should not require it if user won't build extras. Personally I almost never run this command because I don't usually compile tokudb on my laptop. When tokudb had issues with compiling on OS X, I simply put -DWITHOUT_TOKUDB=1 to my build script. It is saving some time for me every time I issue clean build as well.