RE: Windows symlinks

From: patrick.higgins@cexp.com <patrick.higgins@cexp.com>
Date: Jun 25, 2008, 17:50 UTC
Message-ID: <911589C97062424796D53B625CEC0025E46196@USCOBRMFA-SE-70.northamerica.cexp.com>
In-Reply-To: <32541b130806241704y3befda90j78329af2f30d95d2@mail.gmail.com>

Show 9 quoted lines

> From: Avery Pennarun [mailto:apenwarr@gmail.com]
>
> > Agreed. The first thing we started working on was getting 
> symlinks out of our repositories.
> > Unfortunately, we chose to use them because we are using 
> broken development tools that
> > don't support proper modularity. We found the best way to 
> 
> Perhaps git-submodule would do what you're looking for.

We might be able to get by with them, but submodules appear to be significantly more complex than symlinks, and we sometimes symlink just a file or two if that's all we need. Splitting up submodules to that level of granularity would be hard to manage.

My understanding of the submodule workflow is:

Projects A, B, and C (we actually have about 17 of these) all share common code in project Common. Then, each of A, B, and C adds Common as a submodule. While working on project A, the need arises to modify Common, so the developer changes it there, commits, pushes the change to Common, then commits and pushes the change to A. To update B and C, they would have to change to each of those projects, run a git pull, then git submodule update, and compile and test.

Is that correct? If so, it's a lot more work than letting a symlink propagate the change to all the other projects. Of course, since Windows doesn't have symlinks...