submodules, was Re: RFC: display dirty submodule working directory in git gui and gitk

Hi,

On Mon, 4 Jan 2010, Heiko Voigt wrote:

Johannes wrote:

quoted

The real problem is that submodules in the current form are not very 
well designed.  For example, a submodule being at a different commit 
than in the superproject's index is not as fatal as the submodule 
having changes.

So in the long run, IMHO a proper redesign of the submodules would not 
make only a little sense (it does not help, though, that those who 
implemented and furthered the current approach over other discussed 
approaches do not use submodules themselves -- not even now).

Do you mean the complete workflow (submodules are links to other git 
repos) or the current implementation? Do you have links to other design 
approaches/threads? Would be nice if we could take that into account for 
any decision.

Unfortunately, I do not have any information about different approaches 
except the approach Subversion takes.  While Subversion's externals are 
not perfect for all applications, for some, they are.  So I consider this 
a serious shortcoming that Git does not support that workflow (and in 
fact, AFAIR Shawn's repo does not use submodules for that exact reason).

But I think that an important precondition to come up with a better design 
of the submodules is to have suffered the current implementation in 
real-world work using submodules. (Which reminds me very much of the 
autocrlf mess.)

Ciao,
Dscho