Re: R: git migration - svn:externals

[Felipe Contreras <felipe contreras gmail com>]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 3:28 PM, Simos Xenitellis
<simos lists googlemail com> wrote:
> 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.

I can imagine.

That is a good idea, except that instead of submodules you should use
'git remote' and simply merge the sub-repos. The only difference is
that in the sub-repo the files need to be in the same place they are
going to be in the super-repo.

-- 
Felipe Contreras