Re: git subtree: an alternative to git submodule

From: Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>
Date: May 15, 2009, 18:31 UTC
Message-ID: <32541b130905151131h76048ff2o418764aa41bcd13b@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vzldes0ce.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 2:11 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

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> Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com> writes:
>> ...  Obviously I would need to write a man page, but I've been
>> hesitant to do that in case people have suggestions that need the
>> whole UI to change.  Perhaps that's a chicken-and-egg problem, though,...
>
> If you fear that you might get into a situation that the UI _must_ change
> because it does not fit people's needs or workflows, that is a sign that
> the UI and the workflow it was designed to support may not have been well
> thought out yet.  At least, you do not even _know_ if it is well thought
> out or not.  It is understandable that people would say "sounds cool,
> could potentially be good, but I'll wait and see if it is real" and leave.

Well, I'm already using it myself in my own projects and I like it. So I'm pretty confident that it is *a* useful workflow. Whether it's useful for others is a good question, and the only way to know the answer is to put it out there.

But I'm at a bit of a loss as to why so many people (er, as compared to none) seem to have gotten excited about the tool, but then it fizzled. This implies to me that something is missing. Perhaps it's just the documentation; I'll work on that next, then.

> It is an easy mistake to make to consider inclusion to my tree your goal.
> It can be one of the means to give exposure to wider audience, but it does
> not have to be your only avenue to do so.

Thanks for pointing that out. In fact my primary goal wasn't really to get it included in the tree (otherwise I *would* have written the documentation and even included a signed-off-by line :)) but to get comments on the feature. In fact, it would be detrimental to have it included in your tree and then find out afterwards that it ought to be ripped out and replaced.

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> With proliferation of free hosting services, however, I think contrib/
> area for such purposes outlived its usefulness.  People can now fork and
> gather interested and enthused users very easily and can make *me* beg to
> merge from them to include their new, popular, and already polished
> features.

I suppose you could merge it in using git-subtree and then you wouldn't even have to beg :)

Okay, documentation next.  At least I have somewhere to go from here.

Have fun,

Avery