What collaborative tool would you recommend using with vdm? AOSP has gerrit which is sort of specifically designed for this multi-remote meta setup. GitHub/GitLab don’t play nice with this type of environment.
Repo seriously sucks to use, but I also can't imagine many tools living up to AOSP-type workloads without being specifically designed for it. My gripe with repo is that it's really hard to pin the entire repo state if you have a bunch of prototype patches across multiple subrepos. I usually end up having to modify the XML directly.
I think you nailed how I was feeling in much fewer words!
I actually haven't really put much thought into collaborative/mutlirepo development work using vdm -- the original intent was for it to strictly be a retriever of what the user specifies. I think the majority of both my frustration and complexity of other tools is because they're trying to solve for a lot more than at least I personally usually want to use them for. It's like, I just want a `pip install/requirements.txt/go.{mod,sum}` for any kind of tool, not just the language that takes up the majority of my codebase.
One of the thoughts I had, though, was to maybe add a field for each remote section called e.g. `try_local` that takes a filesystem path, and if that doesn't exist then fetch the remote. That way, your development workflow is exactly the same as usual -- developing a dependency is just doing work in the actual repo directory nearby. I'm not married to the idea though. I just REALLY don't want to have it be in the business of managing git-repos-in-git-repos, because vdm isn't really intended to be a Git tool, if that makes sense.