Re: Location-agnostic submodules

From: Heiko Voigt <hvoigt@hvoigt.net>
Date: May 2, 2012, 16:55 UTC
Message-ID: <20120502165543.GB49462@book.hvoigt.net>
In-Reply-To: <7v4nrzaioc.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Hi,

On Tue, May 01, 2012 at 10:57:07AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> "Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:
> 
> > Would an alternative be something like:
> >    git submodule update <module> --from <remote>
> >
> > so that the user can state which of the current submodule's remotes
> > should be used for fetching the desired update.
> 
> Are you assuming that the <remote> in the above example will be different
> per invocation for a single user?  I would imagine not---it would be more
> like "the upstream has this URL in .gitmodules, but this other mirror is
> closer to my network environment", i.e.
> 
> 	cd <module's directory> && git config remote.origin.url $there
> 
> no?

Yes I think this is an important point. If we start working on this I would like to emphasize the fork use case Philip brought up. When cloning a forked repository with submodules you always have the problem of changing/adding the forked submodules remotes afterwards.

For me it would be more like an additional lookup mechanism of the "official" urls / names. Since I like to stay as close as possible to the upstream repository I usually refrain from changing the .gitmodules file. A changed .gitmodules file with additional urls (possibly some private ones) is not something you can propagate upstream.

What I would like is a mechanism that, given a wanted sha1, would lookup the correct remote to clone/fetch from. But, I have to admit that even though thinking about this for some time now, I have not got to a satisfying answer for myself yet.

Cheers Heiko