Re: [RFC] Fourth round of support for cloning submodules

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: May 24, 2007, 13:52 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0705241446070.4648@racer.site>
In-Reply-To: <20070524132434.GQ942MdfPADPa@greensroom.kotnet.org>

Hi,

On Thu, 24 May 2007, Sven Verdoolaege wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> On Thu, May 24, 2007 at 02:17:27PM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> > On Thu, 24 May 2007, Sven Verdoolaege wrote:
> > > I suppose we could just set it to 0.
> > > I also don't think the URL should be associated to a ref.
> > 
> > It does not need to be.
> > 
> > But then, it is sort of a "subref": You could just clone the submodule in 
> > its own right, correct?
> 
> Exactly, but the information we want is not associated to any
> particular revision of the submodule.  It just points to the repo.
> It's also not associated with any revision of the supermodule.
> That information should go in a tracked .gitmodules file.

It is not that expensive to just give the SHA-1 with the URL, and to introduce a new namespace, say

3f... submodule/path^{URL:blablub}

to say that the submodule which is connected in "HEAD:path" is available with the URL "blablub" and just so happens to be at commit "3f..." at the moment. Heck, you can even use this instead of expensive fetches to verify up-to-date, and even more, you can make sure that you are as up-to-date as the remote supermodule.

But then, I do not care about that deeply. Like I said, I haven't followed the discussions, but I really do not understand why an information as essential to a superproject is not contained in something like HEAD:.gitmodules. Git does not have to take it from there, it can still continue to take it from a local config in .git/, but .gitmodules can live in the tree happily, for the pleasure of the tools (if only to initialise the first version of the local config after clone).

Without some very intrusive surgery into the transport code of Git, in 22 patches, which I am not at all comfortable with.

Ciao, Dscho