Re: R: git migration - svn:externals

[Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com>]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 1:17 PM, Felipe Contreras
<felipe contreras gmail com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) <zeenix gmail com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Tim-Philipp Müller <t i m zen co uk> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2009-04-23 at 12:09 +0200, Jaap A. Haitsma wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think gst-ffmpeg uses this feature. gst-ffmpeg is in git while it
>>>> uses ffmpeg which is in svn.
>>>
>>> Not really - gst-ffmpeg just runs svn checkout in autogen.sh, and that's
>>> it.
>>>
>>> We use git submodules in GStreamer though (we have a 'common' submodule
>>> for all other modules), but git submodules are still fairly cumbersome
>>> to use and I wouldn't recommend them until the git people make them less
>>> painful to use, at least not for projects where the submodule reference
>>> needs to be updated frequently.
>>
>>   This whole idea of sub-modules is just brain-dead so I wouldn't
>> count on git developers fixing that instead of concentrating on
>> features of real importance. If you have some code (or even data) that
>> is needed by more than one of your modules/packages, you either put
>> that common stuff in another module/package and make other packages
>> depend on this or you just bite the bullet and don't mind the
>> redundancy. In some cases you just have to wisely use the combination
>> of both.
>
> I'm involved a bit in git development and I have to say that view is
> pretty much accurate.
>
> 'git submodule' is essentially a big hack and nobody from the main
> developers is actively working on it. Of course patches are accepted
> and support is improving, but I wouldn't recommend any major projects
> to depend on it.

There was a suggestion at gnome-i18n to have all translation material in
a single repository (such as 'lang-LL', where LL is the a lanugage code),
and then have a super-lang module with all those individual submodules.
Then, any GNOME module would simply need to have the super-lang module as
its submodule, to cater for the l10n needs.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2009-January/msg00201.html

In theory it looked good; in practice it was quite error-prone due to
the sequence
of commands that one currently needs to run with git, in order to activate the
submodules. And other usability and maintenance issues.

Simos