Re: Managing submodules on large multi-user projects

From: R. Tyler Ballance <tyler@slide.com>
Date: Jun 23, 2009, 22:58 UTC
Message-ID: <20090623225828.GD734@starfruit.corp.slide.com>
In-Reply-To: <94a0d4530905291558u564b4648ted79900b405f91b4@mail.gmail.com>

Hey Felipe, reply inline..

On Sat, 30 May 2009, Felipe Contreras wrote:

Show 28 quoted lines

> On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 9:41 PM, R. Tyler Ballance <tyler@slide.com> wrote:
> > I've noticed that keeping submodules updated is an absolute pain,
> > particularly with a large multiuser setup with *lots* of branches.
> >
> >
> > What will tend to happen is that the submodule reference will be updated
> > in the master branch (we use a centralized model) and then committed
> > (imagine the commit reference was incremented from A-B).
> >
> > Other developers with other branches will then periodically merge master
> > into their project/topic branches but will either neglect to run
> > `git submodule update` or our bootstrap script (which also executes the
> > submodule update command). At this point they'll have outstanding
> > changes of their own, and the submodule will be marked as "modified" as
> > well. Usually what will then happen is they'll `git commit -a` without
> > thinking and the submodule's reference will be changed (typically from
> > B->A, undoing the previous change).
> >
> >
> > Are there any saner ways of managing this? I've been trying to get the
> > `git submodule update` command to run with as many hooks as possible
> > (pre-commit, post-update) to make sure that developers aren't
> > inadvertantly breaking things, but nothing seems to ensure that
> > *everybody* is up to date and that *everybody* doesn't inadvertantly
> > commit changes to the submodule?
> 
> Have you tried repo?
> http://source.android.com/download/using-repo

No I've not tried repo, and the likelihood of getting our now 100+ user organization to switch over is highly unlikely.

Since I originally posted to this thread, I've had to entirely *remove* the submodule from the super-project and just dump the code in (boo, hiss) since it just caused too much damn trouble.

I'm going to give a newer version of Git a try and hope that everythin is better now, since the need has arisen for a git submodule again and things will get gnarly if I have to do another source dump.

:(

-R. Tyler Ballance Slide, Inc.