[ANNOUNCE] intergit repository-linking tool (early release)

[Christian Jaeger <christian@pflanze.mine.nu>]

Hello

Ten days ago I started a thread about "Separating generated files?" [1], 
and suggested in the end that instead of using git submodule 
functionality, one might be better off using a tool which can, upon 
committing files in the repository containing generated files, add a 
link ("reference") pointing to the commit in the source repository which 
represents the source files they have been generated from, and then when 
someone is checking out some revision of the source files later, use 
this information to find the (best-)matching commit in the repository 
with the generated files. This may also be useful in other situations 
where one likes to keep repositories separate but they have a version 
dependency on each other.

I've now written a first version of a pair of these two programs, which 
accomplishes this. You can get them from:

http://www.christianjaeger.ch/dyn/pubgit/gitweb?p=intergit.git;a=summary
git clone http://christianjaeger.ch/pubgit/intergit.git

This will need some finish before really being production ready; it will 
mainly need some experimentation on how it is to be used exactly, so 
that possibly missing features in the search and indexing algorithms can 
be added (like whether it should understand merges between two commits 
containing references as a commit having both references even if the 
merge commit doesn't specify a reference), and I'm also keen on some 
feedback implementation-wise (building the index is currently slow, and 
some of the problems that I'm listing in the docs (Implementation.txt 
and TODO.txt) may have solutions I've not been aware of). I've tried to 
add some useful documentation (see *.txt files), so I'm hoping this 
helps anyone interested to understand how it works, or just give me some 
feedback on how it may or may not be useful.

I've developed and tested it on Linux. Hints on whether it works under 
other systems and how to make it work with msysgit would be very 
appreciated.

Christian

[1] http://marc.info/?l=git&m=122415845625044&w=2

PS. I've just noticed the thread about "repo - The Multiple Git 
Repository Tool". I'll have to take a look first to see how it is 
related to my program--it may take me a few days as I'll be busy.

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