From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 13:46:49 GMT
Subject: Re: [3/4] What's not in 1.5.2 (new topics)
Message-ID: <20070517134649.GA20853@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20070517124622.GP4489@pasky.or.cz>

On Thu, May 17, 2007 at 02:46:22PM +0200, Petr Baudis wrote:

> > why can't I just have _repo_ configuration:
> > 
> >  	[subproject "kernel/"]
> >          	URL = http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux-2.6.git
> > ?
> > It can be first-time cloned from the upstream, but it stays after
> > people change it to suit their systems. They can depend on it not to
> > be broken by upstream.
> 
> Because kernel/ can get removed, moved around, or point at entirely
> *different* projects over time and branches - kernel/ can switch from
> linux-2.4 to linux-2.6, libc/ can switch between glibc and uClibc, ...

I think we clearly need a 2-level system: a tracked pointer to the repo,
with an optional local override.

However, I don't quite like Junio's idea of using the URL as a key,
since it is intended to change. IOW, if I am overriding your URL via
.git/config, if you change your URL then my config is now broken.

Instead, why not:
  1. url location is supplied in configuration as
     [subproject "kernel/"]
       url = git://git.kernel.org/pub/linux-2.4.git
  2. .gitmodules is simply read as a lower-priority version of
     configuration

One advantage of this approach is that it's totally general; instead of
.gitmodules, we could in fact be talking about .gitconfig, a mechanism
for projects to contain tracked configuration that can be overridden by
individual repos. For some projects, I imagine some of the commit
encoding config options might make sense.

Thoughts?

-Peff