Am 07.10.2015 um 00:00 schrieb Stefan Beller:
So a discussing started in a Gerrit change [1] if we want to name it submodule or subproject. We decided to stick with the git core convention of naming it subproject for now.
What convention? Isn't diff output the only place where we talk about subprojects?
But that lead me to the question: What is the difference of a submodule and a subproject?
A submodule is a certain kind subproject (using a GITLINK and a .gitmodules entry), but e.g. a GITLINK could be used by other tooling to represent subprojects without using a .gitmodules file. So submodules are one in-core specialization of subprojects, the other is git subtree (which doesn't even use GITLINKs).
As far as I can tell they are synonyms (internally also called GIT_LINK, but we never expose that to the users), where the term submodule was coined later in the game, subproject being there as the first term introduced in version 1.5. So is it worth to unify that same concept hiding between two names?
I doubt that, as one is a subset of the other.
Looking through the code we cannot switch to submodule as the literal string "subproject" is used for diffs in the plumbing layer.
Exactly, we cannot change that easily because of compatibility issues.
But getting rid of submodule is also not easy, as there is git-submodule.sh as a direct command.
Yup, that would confuse lots of users and break tons of scripts.
So then there is also git subtree, which "allow subprojects to be included within a subdirectory of the main project, optionally including the subproject’s entire history." (the man page) So can I understand a subproject as either a submodule or a subtree ?
Or even some other method of embedding another repo.
If so would it make sense to add an entry to gitglossary to state that subprojects are generic term for having some kind of structure? (a subdirectory containing independent stuff could be considered a subproject. i.e. We could make contrib/examples the historic-git subproject ?)
Better documenting that is a good idea (though I'm not sure what you mean by making "contrib/examples the historic-git subproject"). -- 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