Hi! As someone who has coded around git submodule by creating "repo" for Android, I'm certainly interested in git submodule improvements, so this is a great idea for a GSoC project. I have some comments below that may help improve your proposal before you submit it. P Baker <me@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Abstract: > This project focuses on upgrading git-submodule to manage code > created in external projects in ways that allow users to safely branch > and merge that code without loss of data or routine merge conflicts. > This will incorporate some changes made on the ???pu??? branch, but will > also include making substantial changes to git-submodule underlying > code. ... > As opposed to ???remotes,??? which also incorporate external code into a > project, I'm not sure what you mean by that. Typically a "remote" in Git is thought to be a configuration that says where to download a fork of this project from. By default you get one remote, called "origin", which is where you initially cloned your fork from, but you can add many more, such as other developers you frequently collaborate with. This is quite different from the problem that submodule tries to address, as its dealing with forks of of the *same* project. But a submodule is trying to point to forks of *other* projects, whose histories are (possibly) unrelated to this project's history. > The tentative timeline is: > > End of May ??? Conclusively finish the public discussion regarding where > git-submodules needs to go > Beginning of June ??? Produce final specifications (including method stubs) > Middle of July ??? Finish active code and test development > End of July ??? Merge code into production release, fix public submitted bugs > Middle of August ??? Prepare code for final release and finish > user-facing documentation IMHO, this is too vague. *What exactly* are the features you want to add to git submodule? Break this down by features, not by phases of coding. Further, you spend roughly a month writing method stubs. My experience with such development practices is that you will get frustrated by not having the code working, get bored with it, and walk away. Or at best, you'll be able to stub it all out, but will need to redo most of the stubs because you find later on while writing the implementation code that you need to pass data through that you didn't initially anticipate. Also, we very much prefer Git patches to update the documentation at the same time that the code changes. Maybe its done in the same patch, if the code+doc update are relatively small, or maybe its done in two patches in the same series (code change, then doc update), but the general guideline is that both code and documentation should be updated at roughly the same time (e.g. same day for Junio when he merges the series down to master). This way the documentation doesn't stray too far from the code its describing. > A few specific changes that this project will likely include are: > > *use .git instead of .gitmodules > *move objects of submodules into .git/ directory > *git submodule update --init should initialize nested levels of submodules > *protect changes in local submodules when doing ???git submodule update??? As I said above, I'd like to see this described in the timeline better, each of these could be done independently, so you could work on one item try to get it completed, tested, documented, and merged into Junio's tree, and then start the next item. At worst at the end of the summer you'll have a fraction of these done, merged, and available for users, which is better than trying to do it all and failing to get none merged. I'd like to know more about each of these items, and less about the general reasoning of where you got these feature ideas from. What exactly are you talking about changing, and why? I don't need to see detailed code at this stage, but I'd like a better description of the user-visible changes that each bullet point might cause, and why you feel this change is better than what we have today. -- Shawn. -- 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
