On Thu, Jun 05, 2014 at 09:03:25AM -0500, Robert Dailey wrote:
> When I work on a feature, I normally create a feature branch. If I
> happen to make changes to the submodule that only work with the
> changes introduced in my feature branch, that seems to complicate
> things. For the purposes of the feature branch, do I need to create
> a corresponding feature branch in the submodule and temporarily
> update the submodule URL to point to it? When I merge my feature
> branch, I'd have to swap it back?
So you have:
On the trunk host: On your public host: Locally:
superproject superproject superproject
submodule submodule `-- submodule
In that case, a corresponding feature branch to the submodule, and an
update to submodule.<name>.url (and possibly submodule.<name>.branch)
would be the way I'd go (at A in the figure below). Once the trunk
maintainers were happy with things, they could merge the submodule
branch into trunk's submodule (at B in the figure below), and you
could add a capping commit to your superproject branch that reverted
the gitmodule changes (at C in the figure below):
-o---o---o---o-------o trunk's superproject/master
\ /
A---o---o---o---C your superproject/feature
-o---o-----------B trunk's submodule/master
\ /
o---o---o---- your submodule/feature
An alternative is to use relative URLs in the trunk:
superproject$ cat .gitmodules
[submodule "bpl-subset"]
path = submod
url = ../submodule
which makes it easier for folks who mirror/fork both the superproject
and submodule (no need to change submodule.<name>.url). However, it
makes it harder for folks who just mirror/fork the superproject (and
don't need to tweak the submodule), because they have to mirror/fork
the submodule as well to support the relative URL (or edit
submodule.<name>.url, which turns attempted mirrors into forks).
Personally, I prefer relative URLs [1,2], but both external projects
I've approached on this front have ended up with absolute URLs [3,4]
;).
This is less of an issue for loosely-coupled submodules, since you'll
can motivate your submodule changes to the submodule maintainers
independent of the superproject (i.e. you can just say things like
“I'm extending the API so I can iterate over widgets. This lets you
do things like frobbling whatsits in superproject” without having to
present the associated superproject code). Once you land the
submodule changes upstream, your superproject branch will work without
the need to tweak the URL (for absolute URLs) or publish a sibling
mirror (for relative URLs).
Cheers,
Trevor
[1]: https://github.com/inducer/pycuda/pull/21
[2]: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.ipython.devel/10287/focus=10299
[3]: https://github.com/wking/pycuda/commit/5218bd449d6aae0bce3a3d1bf54a91377445e2f9
[4]: https://github.com/minrk/ipython/commit/4fe230e96e357b3612b6fadaeec9d8de71d6fca9
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