Re: Submodule regression in 2.14?

[Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>]

On Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 9:05 AM, Heiko Voigt <hvoigt@hvoigt.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 11:51:13PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> As long as we are talking about idealized future world (well, at
>> least an idea of somebody's "ideal", not necessarily shared by
>> everybody), I wonder if there is even any need to have commits in
>> submodules in such a world.  To realize such a "monorepo" world, you
>> might be better off allowing a gitlink in the superproject to
>> directly point at a tree object in a submodule repository (making
>> them physically a single repository is an optional implementation
>> detail I choose to ignore in this discussion).
>
> IMO this is one step to far. One main use of submodules are shared
> repositories that are used by many superprojects. The reason you want to
> have commits in the submodule are so that you can push them
> independently and all other users can pick up the changes. You could get
> by by Using the superproject commits for the submodule once you push or
> something but those do not necessarily make sense in the context of the
> submodule.
>
> So I think it is important that there are commits in the submodule so
> its history makes sense independently for others.
>
> Or how would you push out the history in the submodule in your idea?
> Maybe I am missing something? What would be your use case with gitlinks
> pointing to trees?

Well there are still commits, but in the superproject the UX feels more
as if the submodules were special trees. So if you want to interact with
the submodule specifically, you could do things like

    git add /path/inside/sub
    # works seamlessly from the superproject tree

    git commit --submodule-commit-only
    # When the flag is not give, you may get an editor
    # asking for two commit messages, (sub+super)

    git fetch --submodule
    # When the flag is not given, we'd fetch superproject and
    # on-demand

    # You feel the superproject is in the way?
    git worktree add --for-submodule <path/to/sub> ...
    # The new submodule worktree puts the
    # submodule only UX first. so it feels like its own
    # repository, no need for specific flags.


>
> Cheers Heiko