Re: RFC: Subprojects

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Sat, 14 Jan 2006, A Large Angry SCM wrote:
>
> So far I've not seen any convincing arguments why the sub-projects can not be
> managed by the Makefile, or equivalent, of the super-project. Particularly
> when the sub-projects have a life of their own.

Now, from a developer standpoint I actually agree with you. I find 
sub-projects totally useless - I'm much happier just having separate 
trees.

The advantage (as far as I can tell) of sub-projects is not that they are 
easier to develop in, but that it's a total nightmare for the technical 
_user_ to download ten different projects from ten different sites, and 
configure them properly and install them in the right order, and keep them 
up-to-date.

There are projects that I simply gave up even trying to track: I wasn't 
interested in being a developer per se, but I _was_ interested in trying 
to test and give feedback to the current development tree - but it was 
just too damn confusing to get it working.

If I could have just done a "git clone <top-level>" to get it all, I'd 
have been a much more productive user.

This is why I think sub-projects are more about "git checkout" and an 
automated "git fetch" than anything else. Doing actual development etc you 
can easily do one project at a time. "git diff" and "git commit" wouldn't 
need any real ability to recurse into subprojects and try to make it 
seamless. And if you do a "git pull" that needs to do anything but 
fast-forward, you might as well resolve the sub-projects one by one.

		Linus