Re: RFC: Subprojects

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jan 14, 2006, 20:02 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0601141154590.13339@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <43C951B6.5030607@gmail.com>

On Sat, 14 Jan 2006, A Large Angry SCM wrote:

>
> So far I've not seen any convincing arguments why the sub-projects can not be
> managed by the Makefile, or equivalent, of the super-project. Particularly
> when the sub-projects have a life of their own.

Now, from a developer standpoint I actually agree with you. I find sub-projects totally useless - I'm much happier just having separate trees.

The advantage (as far as I can tell) of sub-projects is not that they are easier to develop in, but that it's a total nightmare for the technical _user_ to download ten different projects from ten different sites, and configure them properly and install them in the right order, and keep them up-to-date.

There are projects that I simply gave up even trying to track: I wasn't interested in being a developer per se, but I _was_ interested in trying to test and give feedback to the current development tree - but it was just too damn confusing to get it working.

If I could have just done a "git clone <top-level>" to get it all, I'd have been a much more productive user.

This is why I think sub-projects are more about "git checkout" and an automated "git fetch" than anything else. Doing actual development etc you can easily do one project at a time. "git diff" and "git commit" wouldn't need any real ability to recurse into subprojects and try to make it seamless. And if you do a "git pull" that needs to do anything but fast-forward, you might as well resolve the sub-projects one by one.

		Linus