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I posit that if Git or Mercurial had better workflows for submodules, monolithic repositories would seem less attractive.

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I don't disagree. Although, for the case where you want to copy/move things across repositories, monolithic repositories still have the advantage that history is more easily preserved. Although you can argue that proper submodule support would handle this and preserve history.

Although, for the case where you want to copy/move things across repositories, monolithic repositories still have the advantage that history is more easily preserved.

Well, let's wait and see how partial clones actually handle this situation. I'm not convinced a partially cloned monolithic repository will be better than what submodules currently do.

atlassian recommends you consider sub tree as an option if you are looking at Git submodule

Subtrees are nice for some use cases. But that's the very problem, there's no general (and supported out-of-the-box) solution to the problem. DVCSes have solved the distributed development part for one (sub)project, but we currently don't have a compelling solution for distributed development across several (sub)projects.

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