Would GIT submodules be a good idea?

[Jesse Phillips]

On Tue, 16 Aug 2011 08:54:16 +0200, Jacob Carlborg wrote:

> I'm not exactly sure what you mean with "one source base", because
> currently all OS specific stuff are in one repository.
> 
>> But do you really need submodules? If you want dwt you'll either pull
>> in dtw-win dwt-linux as a submodule of your own or just dwt-linux and
>> jface.
> 
> The problem is that you also always need the "base" repository. Which
> contains implementations of the some Java classes and other utility
> functions used by dwt.

Oh, that makes sense then yeah submodules is not a bad approach.
 
>> Personally I think the OS's should be brought together and the library/
>> language separation should be their own repos (jface its own repo). In
>> fact if that sounds reasonable I'll volunteer to try and make it happen
>> (as you've done dwt-mac you might know this is a bad idea)?
> 
> Currently everything is in one repository but it's in separate top level
> directories. Having all the OS's merge in the same directory would be
> very very bad. First, it's just too much code for that. Second it's not
> how SWT is arranged and it would be very difficult to port future
> versions of SWT.
> 
> That was why I thought submodules could take the best of both
> approaches, that is, one repository for everything (like we have now)
> versus individual repositories for each project.
> 
> I think I need to read more about submodules. What I was hoping for was
> that you could have individual repositories for each project and then a
> super project. When the super project could contain the build script and
> when it's cloned the sub respiratory will be cloned as well.

It is almost like that. It's just that the cloning also requires the 
initialization and cloning of the submodules. You'll have to keep them in 
sync and I've never submoduled a project that had submodules it self.

I'm not user if there is much point in separating them if you can use dwt-
linux or win in something else. But jface could be its own repository as 
that isn't required to used DWT at all. And making that a submodule is 
fine.