Re: [git subtree] documentation and new --squash mode

On 2009-05-30 18:36:18, Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com> wrote:

Great! Thanks; I've been sort of holding off on trying this for a while and this ought to push me.

I have a very high level question. My situation is that I am evangelising git at work, and the bulk of the audience are SVN, with some VSS and CVS here and there.

As such, one of the main things I have to tell them is "you can't just take a subdirectory of the main project and check it out/work/commit, etc", and that "if you can plan it properly you can do it using submodules".

The flaw in the above is that I myself have not yet used submodules other than doing the toy example in the docs, and am not confident of being able to solve arbitrary problems that may be presented to me by folks. The need to force them to think and plan this in advance is also sometimes an impediment. [If you're surprised, you need to put "the daily wtf" on your RSS feed ;-)]

As I understand the documentation (and past emails, snippets of IRC traffic, etc) git subtree will help me do precisely what I want -- a simple way to deal with this all-too-common SVN-ism. If not "simple", at least

  - simpler than submodules, and

  - no need for advance planning [1] about what parts will
    be subprojects.

Is my understanding correct?

Thanks,

Sitaram

[1] I do understand filter-branch quite well, and I know that even without advance planning it is possible to separate a subdirectory into its own repo using filter-branch. I don't fancy teaching *them* filter-branch, so that makes me personally central to their projects, which is not scalable at all.