Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 2/2] push: teach --recurse-submodules the on-demand option

From: Jens Lehmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:48:27 +0100

Am 13.12.2011 00:50, schrieb Phil Hord:
> On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 5:29 PM, Jens Lehmann <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> Am 12.12.2011 22:16, schrieb Phil Hord:
>>>  I thought-experimented with this a bit last year and came to the
>>> conclusion that I should be able to 'float' to tips (developer
>>> convenience) and also to store the SHA-1 of each gitlink through
>>> history (automated maybe; as-needed).
>>
>> Which means that after "git submodule update" floated a submodule branch
>> further, you would have to commit that in the superproject.
> 
> Sadly, yes.  Currently I have my CI-server do this for me after it
> verifies each new submodule commit is able to build successfully.

Which I think is a good thing to do, as you have a good chance of
catching breakage introduced by the submodule updates. "float-only"
submodules won't always be a pleasant experience, as they can (and
sometimes will) get you into trouble when advancing them introduces
bugs (and then you can't even bisect that breakage).

>>> The problem with "float + gitlinks", of course, is that it looks like
>>> "not floating" to the developers (git-status is dirty unless
>>> overridden, etc.)
>>
>> Yeah. But what if each "git submodule update" would update the tip of
>> the submodule branch and add that to the superproject? You could follow
>> a tip but still produce reproducible trees.
> 
> Yes, and that's what I want.
> 
> Not what it sounded like was being suggested before, which (to my
> eyes) implied that the submodule gitlinks were useless noise.

It was suggested in other threads in the past. For a start, you could
write a script doing that and play around with it. And if that works
well for you, we can discuss if implementing that functionality into
"git submodule update" makes sense.