[Kde-scm-interest] git submodule

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

On Friday 24 September 2010 03:04:45 Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> On 23.09.10 14:29:53, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > Regarding the issue of managing multiple little repositories when working
> > on an entire module, if we decide to go with the (preferred) split
> > approach, has anyone considered the potential of git-submodule? I've
> > used it for exactly this purpose and have had a lot of success with it.
> 
> IMHO this is not (yet) suitable for our usecases. We're not talking
> about 1 or 2 repos that we'd put into a 'bigger' one. With each
> submodule that is being added to the bigger module it gets more tedious
> to maintain that because you have to update the bigger one each time one
> of the submodules is being changed. Also one has to change the
> remote for each subrepo you want to work on so you can push.
> 
> Not to mention what happens if someone forgot to push the subrepo but
> pushed already the upper repo.
> 
> We're using a single submodule at work to integrate a supplemental
> library and while it does work its also tedious and error-prone. Not
> really something you want to impose on first-time contributors or people
> not having grasped git fully yet.
> 
I am not going to push submodules heavily, but we are using them at Kitware 
quite effectively, and not just for read only libraries. We have added some 
stuff on the server side to check that a submodule is not pointing at an 
uncommitted hash, and we are using a few features in git next (soon to be 
released I believe) to resolve common conflicts.

There are open source projects such as Titan and ParaView doing this already. 
There is also Google's repo tool, that they use for Android development (built 
on top of Git) that I keep meaning to check out. There are several rough edges 
I would like to smooth out, but it is feasible.

Marcus