Re: Notes on Using Git with Subprojects

From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Date: Sep 26, 2006, 21:23 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0609261629160.9789@iabervon.org>
In-Reply-To: <45196628.9010107@gmail.com>

On Tue, 26 Sep 2006, A Large Angry SCM wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> Git, unfortunately, does not make it easy. What is wanted is to put all
> of the subprojects in one repository and be able to checkout the various
> parts from a local copy of the repository. The problem is, with Git, a
> repository can have at most one working directory associated with it at
> a time. This is because Git stores a lot of information about the
> contents of the working directory in the repository. In fact, the usual
> situation is that the repository, itself, is in the working directory.

There are a bunch of use cases which people see as subprojects, with slightly different desires. For example, I personally don't think there's any point to subprojects if a commit of the parent project doesn't specify the embedded commits of each subproject (so, for example, you can use bisect on the parent project to figure out which act of updating a subproject broke the resulting system). AFAICT, your design doesn't handle that, but uses the most recently fetched versions of all subprojects, with the revision control of the parent only handling revisions in the arrangement and membership of subprojects in the parent.

	-Daniel
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