Re: Composing git repositories

From: Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 2, 2013, 18:35 UTC
Message-ID: <CALkWK0nVax9HtM-M2zo-KH6U2jWznaUH9yBn4y1wqDW8f-mfOg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <51597A37.1010301@web.de>

Jens Lehmann wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> But I think we recently learned to support that use case with
> submodules. I think there are two floating models:
>
> - Tracked:
> [...]
>
> - Untracked:
>   Some people just want "the newest" tip of a branch checked out in
>   the submodule and update that from time to time (I suspect this
>   is because they are used to SVN externals, which I believe work
>   that way). You throw away reproducibility, which I think is not
>   good and not the way I expect Git to work.
> [...]

Nope, it has nothing to do with SVN externals; I've never used them. And no, all repositories aren't created equal. I should be able to add in magit.git into my dotfiles repository without worrying about which commits the other repositories were at a particular commit. If my project depends on the bleeding edge of poppler and girarra, I should always be able to tell what commits in each subproject the build was passing in. In other words, I should be able to freely mixed floating and fixed submodules. There's no reason for one to be Right, and the other to be a shunned second-class citizen.