John Keeping wrote: > 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... Yes! >> 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. Sure you can have a dirty worktree. It's just like .gitmodules: there's zero difference but for the fact that .gitmodules is accessible directly via your filesystem, while links are not. >> 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? Yes, but that is not true floating: you shouldn't have to be sorry and rebase. In new-style submodules, they're first class citizens (ie. true): you can just replace the SHA-1 with a ref in the link. >> 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? This is a very fringe case that I haven't thought about. I don't know how it will behave: I haven't built it yet (and don't have the entire implementation in my head yet). >> 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 You can't control the most fundamental thing, stat(): this is the primary killer of performance on a large worktree. There is currently no way to block stat(): new-style submodules offers a way to configure which submodules to block the stat() on. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html