best practices for multiple packages and submodules on git.d.o

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Stefano Zacchiroli <zack at debian.org> [2008.03.11.0920 +0100]:
> Even though I've never used that particular feature of git, it occurred
> to me that the proper git solution for this are submodules [2].

Are you sure? I suggest you read the discussion logged at
http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git?date=2007-09-06,Thu&sel=578#l979

The important thing to note is that the current commit of
a submodule is a feature of the supermodule. If the submodule's
repository gets a new commit, your submodule clone will *not* be
updated until you explicitly update it. Once you did that, you
*also* have to commit a change to the supermodule.

You may want this just as well, but I feel you need to explicitly
consider it.

> My question for the list is: do we have already in Debian best practices
> for maintaining large package repositories with git, from which I can
> learn how well the submodule idea works in practice?

None that I know of.

On the other hand, it might be really cool as soon as you have to
deal with different suites. Imagine that ocaml in etch is all based
on version 1.x (of ocaml-something) and in lenny, you want 2.x. You
use maint/etch branches for each package, but that gets quite
annoying after a while. So instead, you have a supermodule with
references to all the commit IDs which made up etch, and you can
keep track that way.

Hm, but maybe this isn't actually making it less cumbersome. After
all, it might just be easier to have a good branching policy and set
up mr to keep the 100+ repositories in lockstep. This is what I do,
this is the closest thing to svn:externals you can get with git.

> Also, maybe more of a question for alioth.d.o admins, do
> submodules works well with our current git.d.o infrastructure?

Submodules are nothing but plain git repositories, so yes.

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at debian.org>
: :'  :  proud Debian developer, author, administrator, and user
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck - http://debiansystem.info
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
 
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