When working with submodules it is possible that their history were rewritten git fetch will fail with a message like "error: Server does not allow request for unadvertised object". (With regular git usage, you can fetch again and git will succeed. )

What happens with git-plugin is it makes this into an exception causing my declarative pipeline to fail. What I would like to do is to put checkout step into a retry(2) block and try to recover from this kind of issues.

This is where I see exceptions are stemming from.

https://github.com/jenkinsci/git-plugin/blob/master/src/main/java/hudson/plugins/git/GitSCM.java#L998

What I would like to suggest is to have an option in git-plugin to turn exceptions into failures, so I can re-execute my checkout step once more.

Does that make sense?