From: Linus Torvalds Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2006 20:02:37 GMT Subject: Re: RFC: Subprojects Message-ID: 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 " 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