Looks like this tiny nightmare might be behind me. I don't know 
what happened, but some combination of git clone, git reset --hard 
HEAD, git clean -dxff, git checkout master, and manually copying 
missing admin and cmake .git folders seems to have gotten the 
switch_all_submodules_to_head_and_clean script to remain calm and 
quiet and stop terminating.

No more fatal messages.

I updated my wrapper script to tee the output of 
switch_all_submodules_to_head_and_clean script to a log.

Took 3 hours to clone tde-i18n --- something not right about that.

What a wasted day --- back to building packages and testing!

Darrell