Re: [RFC] Submodules in GIT

On Friday 01 December 2006 23:12, Martin Waitz wrote:

hoi :)

On Fri, Dec 01, 2006 at 11:06:40PM +0100, Josef Weidendorfer wrote:

quoted

quoted

Well, I would actually argue that you may often want to have a
supermodule and then at least have the _option_ to decide to not
fetch all the submodules.

If you want to allow this, you have to be able to cut off fetching the
objects of the supermodule at borders to given submodules, the ones you
do not want to track. With "border" I mean the submodule commit in some
tree of the supermodule.

I don't think this is something special to submodules.  There has been
interest in checking out only a part of the tree even before talking
about submodules and I really think this feature should be independent
to submodules.

It's not about checking out part of the tree, it's about fetching only
part of the objects: If you have a slow modem and want to clone a
supermodule, you are not interested in fetching all the objects from
some submodules.

So it is more like a shallow clone. But even here, submodules are special
as you have defined borders between supermodule and submodules. This gives
you the freedom the introduce a submodule namespace, and allows you to
point to a submodule: "I do not want you!".

With shallow clone, there you do not have this option, so there, you need
to use something like grafting.

BTW: In your submodule implementation, is the user allowed to change the
relative path of the root of some submodule, e.g. with "git-mv" ?

Josef