On Sun, Apr 07, 2013 at 10:52:50PM +0530, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:
> Sure, I'll write it out for you from an end-user perspective:
To play Devil's Advocate for a bit...
> 0. Great UI/UX. No more cd-to-toplevel, and a beautiful set of native
> commands that are consistent with the overall design of git-core.
> Which means: clone (to put something in an unstaged place), add (to
> stage), and commit (to commit the change). There's now exactly one
> place in your worktree (which is represented as one file in git; think
> of it a sort of symlink) to look in for all the information. git
> cat-link <link> to figure out its parameters, git edit-link to edit
> its parameters: no more "find the matching pwd in .gitmodules in
> toplevel". To remove a submodule, just git rm. And git mv works!
Presumably now without .git/config support, so I can't override the
checked-in settings without my own custom branch. Even carrying a dirty
working tree seems problematic here since a checked-out link object is a
directory, which can't have information like the remote URL in it.
> 1. True floating submodules. You can have a submodule checked out at
> `master` or `v3.1`: no more detached HEADs in submodules unless you
> want fixed submodules. No additional cruft required to do the
> floating: the information is native, in a link object.
Can't I do that now with "submodule.<name>.branch" and "git submodule
update --remote --rebase" and friends?
> 2. Initializing a nested submodule without having to initialize the
> outer one: no more repo XML nonsense. And it's composable: you don't
> need to put the information about all submodules in one central place.
How does this interact when there is the following structure:
super
`-- sub
`-- subsub (specified by sub)
and subsub is specified as a submodule in *both* super and sub but with
different settings. Do I get different behaviour depending on $PWD?
> 3. Ability to have very many large submodule repositories without the
> performance hit. It makes sense to block stat() from going through
> when you have floating submodules. This means that many levels of
> nesting are very easily possible.
Can't I already control this to some degree? Certainly the following
commands take different amounts of time to run:
git status
git -c status.submodulesummary=true status
> 4. It's suddenly much easier to add new features to this
> implementation. You don't need to do the kind of gymnastics you'd
> have to do if you were hacking on submodule.c/ git-submodule.sh.
>
> This is basically how "great design" plays out.
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