Re: Making submodules easier to work with

On May 1, 2008, at 11:38 AM, Finn Arne Gangstad wrote:

I have two uses for submodules.

The first one is... well, not really submodules at all. I really want sparse checkout so I can avoid bothering with parts of the larger project tree I don't care about or need. But right now submodules are the only way to approximate sparse checkout, so until we have true sparse checkout support, I want to be able to get semantics that act like the submodules are just subdirectories in the supermodule with no special care required. For this use case, the "automatically update all my submodules and push all of them when I push the supermodule" behavior being discussed here, along with synchronizing local branches between the super and submodules, would be a huge usability improvement.

The second is closer to the current design's intended use case: a sort of version-controlled symbolic link. This is for libraries and other external dependencies. The current model is not too bad for this use case, though ideally I'd like to see it get as low-touch as, say, svn externals, where only one person on a development team needs to worry about setting up and updating submodules and they cause the right files to show up automatically for everyone else.

-Steve