WordPress plugins on wordpress.org as released as production versions absolutely should not contain populated .git directories. As part of our build procedure of a WordPress site, we run “git submodule init” if there is a .gitmodules file at the top level (which there is for most of our sites because we write our own plugins and themes as submodules) and then fetch the submodules with git as appropriate.
Annoyingly, the conf.d/.git directory that came in with version 5.4.0 onwards of the wp-fail2ban plugin causes the “git submodule init” to fail and our build process stops with this error:
fatal: No url found for submodule path ‘docs/wp-content/plugins/wp-fail2ban/conf.d’ in .gitmodules
Failed to initialise submodules
Hence, I’m requesting that the conf.d/.git directory is removed from future releases of wp-fail2ban.