Re: [PATCH 5/5] Add gitmodules(5)

On 6/12/07, Josef Weidendorfer [off-list ref] wrote:

On Tuesday 12 June 2007, Lars Hjemli wrote:

quoted

This is somewhat intentional. I want to move the submodule repos into
.git/submodules/$name/ (with working dir) and symlink this directory
when 'checking out' the submodule. This would be a simple solution for
the following problems:
  -keeping submodule modifications between checkouts
  -having submodules within submodules

Interesting idea.

How does this work
(1) if the submodule checkout changes with the supermodule checkout?
You still would have to store the modifications somewhere.

If you're thinking about the detached HEAD: yeah, that's a problem. My
initial plan (with later modifications) was something like this:

[path "lib1"]
  submodule=lib
  branch=stable

[path "lib2"]
  submodule=lib
  branch=bleeding

[submodule "lib"]
  url=git://example.com/lib.git

$ git-submodule init
  git-config submodule.lib.url git://example.com/lib.git

$ git-submodule update
  git-clone --bare git://example.com/lib.git .git/submodules/lib.git
  git-clone -l -s -n .git/submodules/lib.git lib1
  (cd lib1 && git-checkout $sha1)
  git-clone -l -s -n .git/submodules/lib.git lib2
  (cd lib2 && git-checkout $sha2)

git-submodule push:
  (cd lib1 && git-push origin $branch1)
  (cd lib2 && git-push origin $branch2)

I thought I could avoid 'git-submodule push' by using symlinks, but
you're right. It will not work. Back to the drawing board (again...)

(2) on platforms which do not allow symlinks

Ok, bad idea.

A workaround for problem (1) would be to create multiple checkouts of the
same submodule if modified, e.g. in .git/submodule/$name/$sha1 .

And the $sha1 would be the sha1 found in the index? I don't think this
would work either. If two branches in the superproject checkout the
same submodule sha1, you could possibly want to keep different changes
in the submodule depending on which branch of the superproject is
checked out.

I guess the user will have to both commit and push submodule changes
before switching branches etc. But that might not be too bad, at least
for the initial submodule support.

Allowing people to work like that is nice, but it should not be forced.
It would also be nice to allow the user to specify another place where
submodule checkouts are to be stored, e.g. when multiple supermodules
share the same submodule.

True. Maybe submodule.<name>.repopath in .git/config? (If not
specified, default to .git/submodules/<name>.git)

--
larsh