Submodules or separate repos?

From: Michael Treibton <mtreibton@googlemail.com>
Date: Apr 25, 2011, 10:35 UTC
Message-ID: <BANLkTinAC2Thuf_z_-DMEHotgF-tqpQYZw@mail.gmail.com>

hi,

please CC me as i am not subscribed

ive recently converted a project that was in svn to use git - and that's gone well.

in doing this ive been wondering if i can't split up the respository more. currently we have this:

project/
    core/
    modules/
        moduleA/
        moduleB/

Which i think is fairly typical of most projects.

i was wondering how feasible it would be to split out "moduleA" and "moduleB" into their own repositories? to me that makes sense. but by themselves neither "moduleA" or "moduleB" would compile without the core.

So...

does this make more sense for submodules or separate repositories?

And if they were separate repositories, how would this work from a development point of view? what about a release of the project? would there be a makefile which pulled in a known version of tarball released from each moduleX repository?

What do most other people do in this situation?

TIA!

Michael