Re: [RFC] Submodules in GIT

From: Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>
Date: Dec 1, 2006, 09:33 UTC
Message-ID: <456FF6D1.4040500@op5.se>
In-Reply-To: <200612010849.11176.andyparkins@gmail.com>

Andy Parkins wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> On Thursday 2006 November 30 18:57, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> 
> (agree with everything in your mail)
> 
>> The only problem I'm seeing atm is that the supermodule somehow has to
>> mark whatever commits it's using from the submodule inside the submodule
>> repo so that they effectively become un-prunable, otherwise the
>> supermodule may some day find itself with a history that it can't restore.
> 
> What about submodule/.git/refs/supermodule/commit12345678, where "12345678" is 
> the hash of the supermodule commit?  This gives a convenient route in the 
> submodule to which commit contains that commit from the submodule; but 
> doesn't write anything into the submodule repository itself.  It's just a tag 
> with a different intent.
>

True, but this makes one repo of the submodule special. Let's say you have this layout

mozilla/.git mozilla/openssl/.git mozilla/xlat/.git

Now, we can be reasonably sure that the 'xlat' repo is something the mozilla core team can push to, or at least we can consider the core repo owners an official "vendor" of tags for the submodule repo. I'm fairly certain openssl authors won't be too happy with allowing the thousands of projects using its code to push tags to its official repo though.

Now that I think about it more, I realize this is completely irrelevant as the ui can create the tags in the submodule with info only from the the supermodule, which means the submodule repo will only be special if it's connected to the supermodule. We just need a command for creating those tags in the submodule repo so people who use the same submodule code for several projects can use the alternates mechanism effectively.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se