On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 8:59 AM, Yaroslav Halchenko <yoh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi All, > > On a recent trip I've listened to the git minutes podcast episode and > got excited to hear Stefan Beller (CCed just in case) describing > ongoing work on submodules mechanism. I got excited, since e.g. > performance improvements would be of great benefit to us too. If you're mostly interested in performance improvements of the status quo (i.e. "make git-submodule fast"), then the work of Prathamesh Chavan (cc'd) might be more interesting to you than what I do. He is porting git-submodule (which is mostly a shell script nowadays) to C, such that we can save a lot of process invocations and can do processing within one process. > In our project, http://datalad.org, git submodules is the basic > mechanism to bring multiple "datasets" (mix of git and git-annex'ed > repositories) under the same roof so we could non-ambiguously > version them all at any level. Cool, glad to here submodules being useful. :) > http://datasets.datalad.org ATM provides quite a sizeable (ATM 370 > repositories, up to 4 levels deep) hierarchy of git/git-annex > repositories all tied together via git submodules mechanism. And as the > collection grows, interactions with it become slower, so additional > options (such as --ignore-submodules=dirty to status) become our > friends. I am not as much concerned about the 370 number than about the 4 layers of nesting. In my experience the nested submodule case is a little bit error prone and the bug reports are not as frequent as there are not as many users of nesting, yet(?) In a neighboring thread on the mailing list we have a discussion on the usefulness of being on branches than in detached HEAD in the submodules. https://public-inbox.org/git/0092CDD27C5F9D418B0F3E9B5D05BE08010287DF@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ This would not break non-ambiguously, rather it would add ease of use. > So I thought to share this as a use-case happen you need more > motivation or just a real-case test-bed for your work. And thank > you again for making Git even Greater. Thanks for the motivation. :) > P.S. Please CCme in your replies (if any), I am not on the list > > With best regards, Cheers, Stefan