Re: [RFC] Submodules in GIT
From: Torgil Svensson <hidden>
Date: 2016-08-11 20:04:56
On 12/16/06, Jakub Narebski [off-list ref] wrote:
quoted
100644 blob <sha1 of blob> >quoted
Sorry, I was sloppy and forgot the names: 100644 blob <sha1 of blob> README 100644 blob <sha1 of blob> REPORTING-BUGS 100644 link <sha1 of blob> <sha1 of commit> AUTHORS 040000 tree <sha1 of tree> arch 040000 tree <sha1 of tree> block 040000 link <sha1 of tree> <sha1 of commit> misc Now it doesn't looks like trees/blobs anymore so maybe a link object is handy: README 100644 blob <sha1 of blob> REPORTING-BUGS 100644 link <sha1 of link> AUTHORS 040000 tree <sha1 of tree> arch 040000 tree <sha1 of tree> block 040000 link <sha1 of link> misc link-object: <sha1 of commit> <sha1 of tree/blob>What do you need <sha1 of tree/blob> for in link-object? Wouldn't you use usually the sha1 of top tree of a commit, which is uniquely defined by commit object, so you need only <ahs1 of commit>?
1. "Sparse" repository's - In my example, I want to cherry-pick header-files or binary-files from different projects without fetching all, potentially huge, submodules in their entirety. Imaging having X, kernel, gcc, gtk and libc6 as sub-projects and you really only care about some header files. 2. Super-module directory-hierarchy independent from submodules. Super-project want to have the header-files and binaries it's own way. This also gives version controlled file-collections, the "release case" in my example - collecting different binaries and header-files from different submodules together in a new directory-structure, add some documentation and configuration files and get the whole thing under strong version-control down to the beginning of time for each little component. 3. Super-module development independent of submodules - If we have the tree/blob-object with all it contents in the database many git-operations can act as the link (commit) wasn't there since we have access to all relevant data to work with. This makes it easy to clone the super-project and work on it seamlessly without having to care about submodules or mapping up submodule repository's (unless you want to modify the links or the data underneath it of course).