Re: [RFC] Submodules in GIT

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Mon, 20 Nov 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
> That was shot down by Linus and I agree with him.  "bind" was a
> bad idea because binding of a particular subproject commit into
> a tree is a property of the tree, not one of the commits that
> happen to have that tree.

Yes. I think it would be a _fine_ idea to have a new tree-entry type that 
points to a sub-commit, but it really does need to be on a "tree level", 
not a commit level.

If it's on a tree level, getting things like "git diff" etc to work is not 
impossible, and it will also fit very well into the whole git 
infrastructure.

So right now a tree entry can be another tree or a blob - and the only 
extension would be to add a "commit" type (which would largely _act_ as a 
tree entry, at least for sorting, ie it would use the same "sorts as if it 
had a '/' at the end" logic).

Now, to get everything to work seamlessly within such a commit thing 
might be a fair amount of work, but I'm not sure you even _need_ to. It 
might be ok to just say "subproject 'xyzzy' differs" in the diff, for 
example, and have some rudimentary support for "git status" etc talking 
about subprojects that need to be committed.