Thanks again lissyx.
Update on my git-lfs issue in case it’s helpful to anyone else:
I hosed my vendor/DeepSpeech folder/subtree and tried re-adding it as a git subtree again with the following command:
(voice_to_text) mepstein@pop-os:~/voice_to_text$ git subtree add --prefix vendor https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech.git master --squash
(git subtree is the git solution for vendoring a dependency external-repo inside your own git repo, without taking on the complexity of git-submodule)
but got the following git-lfs error:
Downloading vendor/data/lm/lm.binary (1.8 GB)
Error downloading object: vendor/data/lm/lm.binary (e1fa680): Smudge error: Error downloading vendor/data/lm/lm.binary (e1fa6801b25912a3625f67e0f6cafcdacb24033be9fad5fa272152a0828d7193): batch request: missing protocol: ""
Errors logged to /home/mepstein/voice_to_text/.git/lfs/logs/20190706T101705.161005699.log
Use `git lfs logs last` to view the log.
error: external filter 'git-lfs filter-process' failed
fatal: vendor/data/lm/lm.binary: smudge filter lfs failed
From some googling, the fundamental issue seems to be that “Git LFS currently does not support subtrees, and this is not currently an item on our ROADMAP.”
So I’m going to move forward populating my vendor/DeepSpeech/ subfolder with just a manually downloaded/unzipped copy of the DeepSpeech repo. For anyone considering doing this but nervous about reproduceability from manually downloading a repo as a vendored dependency, github will let you download a snapshot of a repo as of any commit