Re: [RFC] Support projects including other projects

Daniel, I am sorry but I realize I completely misunderstood what you meant by "projects including other projects". What you are trying to solve is the problem of feeding core GIT changes and pure Cogito changes separately to the upstream _within_ _the_ _current_ _source_ _tree_ _structure_ of Cogito, isn't it? That's where your juggling index files and other complexity comes from, and I did not realize that was what you were talking about. I should have realized it when you mentioned kbuild.

Well, personally I do not think such project _overlays_ are worth supporting because it happens rarely, and to a certain extent it is simply an undisciplined way to organize the source tree. Kbuild case may be justified, but I vaguely recall something very similar build infrastructure was used by busybox folks---it could be using just their own copy of kbuild for that matter.

But as you said in a separate message, I agree that core GIT layer is meant to be independent from what Porcelain you put on it. The relationship between Cogito and core GIT is not similar to kbuild and the kernel. It is more like a random X11 application and Xlib. Having them in the same source tree, intermixed, is less than optimal.

I would not be surprised when future, if not the next, Cogito release has source tree organized more like JIT sources, shipping git-pb and cogito in separate directories, managed by separate GIT_DIR. That would make Pasky's life a lot simpler.

And once the separation happens, the issue becomes just a simple package version matching every distribution does (e.g. Debian's binary package and library dependencies, or source Build-Depends dependencies), which is something already has been solved.