Re: Mirror repositories for submodules

Hi,

On 6/5/26 2:05 PM, Benson Muite wrote:

That is precisely what precludes mirroring: if I clone and republish a repository, people can clone from that repository, but will still fetch submodules from the URLs listed in the .gitmodules file.

If that is a relative URL, then all is (mostly) well: they will also ask my mirror server for the submodule, and all I have to do is make it available.

If it is an absolute URL, then I need a side channel to communicate to the client "you can also get this repository from me." This could, for example, generate an insteadOf config, but that would be a horrible hack that becomes unmanageable pretty quickly (updates? security implications?)

Hence this thread: is there a way to represent submodules so that their identity is independent from the hosting location -- and this ties into the other thread from last week, giving projects a stable identity that follows them through clones (or, if someone is using a forge, forks).

The download location for a project is project metadata that lives outside the project view of time, but it is expressed as (versioned) data in git, in the .gitmodules file, so if hosting for a project changes, projects referring to them must either rewrite all of their history, accept that old versions will no longer be buildable because they contain a broken link, or expect people/CI to manually generate insteadOf entries.

So the problem here is that we are treating metadata as data.

    Simon