Re: [PATCH 0/2] Support relative .git file in a submodule

From: Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 8, 2010, 23:24 UTC
Message-ID: <32541b131001081524g43d54a44i582dd286c1dfe7a5@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vocl4urc6.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 6:09 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Brad King <brad.king@kitware.com> writes:
>
>> ... if a submodule
>> has a .git file "symlink" with a relative path to the real submodule
>> repository then ...
>
> ... then I've always thought that is simply a misconfiguration (t0002
> seems to use full path for this exact reason).  Is there a reason why
> relative path should be used/usable here, other than "being able to is
> better than not being able to"???

If I have a bunch of git repos in ~/src, and I decide I'd rather rename it all to ~/source, it seems like it would be nice for all my links not to be broken. This sort of thing can also happen if you have NFS-mounted home directories on a farm of machines, and some of them automount in /u/username and others use /home/username, for example. I think this is the same reason that common sysadmin advice is to use relative symlinks instead of absolute links.

This problem seems especially true with submodules. If the submodule's repo is something like supermodule/.git/submodule.git, a relative path would almost always be a appropriate, no?

Have fun,

Avery