Re: RFC: Subprojects

Dear diary, on Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 07:18:47AM CET, I got a letter
where Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] said that...

Here again I am thinking aloud, remembering the earlier example
of an embedded linux project that ships with linux-2.6 and
gcc-4.0, along with its own README and Makefile at the toplevel
and src/ for its own sources.  The tools at the tip of "pu"
should be able to let you do the following:

	$ git cat-file commit $such_toplevel_commit
	tree $tree
        parent $parent
        bind $primarysub /
        bind $linuxsub linux-2.6/
        bind $gccsub gcc-4.0/
	author A U Thor [off-list ref] 1137392543 -0800
	commmitter A U Thor [off-list ref] 1137392543 -0800

        An example.

where $tree is the object name of the whole tree (no "gitlink"
object), $primarysub and $linuxsub are the object names of
commit objects for the primary subproject (which sits at the
rootlevel) and another subproject (which sits at linux-2.6/
subdirectory).

I perhaps missed this in the thread, but is it really so useful to bind
the subprojects to specific commits? If you care about reproducing
specific configuration, all you have to do is tag and seek recursively -
and even having a separate tiny git branch tracking just a single file
listing the commit ids of subprojects seems more elegant to me than just
forcing the specific commit ids. In the general case, I think it most
usually goes "this project#branch, the latest commit you can get", so
I'm not really convinced that you are optimizing for the right case at
all.

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
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