git remote vs. submodules

Hello All, I was just reading about git remote and I started thinking to myself, "Gee, nothing I've read says that the remotes have to share a common ancestor. I wonder what would happen if I added two independent repositories as remotes to a superproject?"

So I tried it in a very trivial case. The first thing I learned was that I need to make the subprojects subdirectories of a top level .git-housing directory. Or else, when I merge them in, everything in the top level of subproject1 gets mixed in with everything in the top level of subproject2. So this doesn't seem to be a good solution for marrying arbitrary subprojects together. But if I set up a library of subprojects properly, it seems like I could do this.

So now I'm wondering... has anybody else ever had thoughts along these lines? Has anybody tried this? Has anybody seen it work (or fail miserably)?

Why would I want to do this instead of using submodules? I dunno. It just came to mind when I started trying to understand what's really going on with remotes. And I vaguely (and perhaps even correctly) recall there being some controversy regarding submodules when they were first introduced.

Anyway, I figured It wouldn't hurt to ask folks in the know.

--wpd