Re: Git submodule enhancements

From: P. Christeas <p_christ@hol.gr>
Date: Sep 24, 2008, 10:14 UTC
Message-ID: <200809241314.29661.p_christ@hol.gr>
In-Reply-To: <8c5c35580809240213v5198d2abh489915dc1133c75@mail.gmail.com>

On Wednesday 24 September 2008, Lars Hjemli wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> It looks like --cloned requires the downstream to know which
> submodules are available from the same remote as the supermodule (and
> with the same path as registered in the supermodule), i.e. quite a
> specific configuration. Is this really common enough to justify a
> special option to `submodule init`?

I agree. My patch is only a temporary fix for the situation and may not cover all needs.

> Maybe the .gitmodules file could be extended to contain multiple urls
> instead (i.e. both absolute and relative ones)? Then `submodule init`
> could get options like --prefer-relative-url, --prefer-absolute-url
> and --interactive. What do you think?

I guess there is much room for improvement wrt. with the .gitmodules . For one, they should try to mimic the 'git clone' refspec logic, instead of being a static file. (in fact, the hooks could let us do that using scripts alone)

> Hmm, after reading through this once more I guess you're trying to
> clone a non-bare repository, possibly also lacking a .gitmodules file
> (hence the --force)?

Not really. I was trying to have the git-submodule script re-write the conf with a different url. Merely like running a 'submodule sync' at the same time.

> Btw: why doesn't
>   $ git submodule foreach 'git archive HEAD > somewhere/$path.tar'
> work for you?

In fact, it could. You could also replace HEAD with the $sha1 ..

In general, my comment on submodules is that it is a very powerful concept, but still lacks many real-life features. Reading the C code, I realized that we would have to rework all the core plumbing of git in order to have it work accross different git repos inside the same C process. That is a stopper. Otherwise, if we could only have read_tree_recursive() span to different gits, we could do really beautiful things.

Sorry for posting many ideas and only few patches!