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Comment by iveqy | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be almost the same as androids repo tool. https://android.googlesource.com/tools/repo

Personally I don't see the difference between this and submodules. Repo stores the information in xml files, vdm stores it in yaml files and git submodules in the git database. I don't really care.

The real headache for me is the trouble of traceability vs ease of use. You need to specify your dependencies with a sha1 to have traceable SLSA compliant builds, but that also means that you'll need to update all superrepos once a submodule is updated. Gerrit has support for this, but it's not atomic, and what about CI? What about CI that fails?

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>I don’t really care

I care about the aesthetics and the convenience that the tool provides. git-repo at least has a simple command to get all the latest stuff (repo sync). Git submodules is a mess in this regard. Just look at this stack overflow thread:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1030169/pull-latest-chan...

People are confused at how to do THE most basic command that you’d have to do every single day with a multi-repo environment. There’s debating in the comments about what flags you should actually use. No thanks.

There’s a lot of room for improvement in this space. git-repo isn’t widely used outside of aosp. Lots of organizations are struggling with proper tooling for this type of setup.

You update your submodules every day?

Also, the discussions are there because it's been more than a decade and the options have evolved over time.

Submodules are a bit clunky but the problem it solves is itself clunky. Bringing in another tool doesn't really feel like its going to reduce the burden.

I have yet to be in a situation where I blindly want to update all submodules. It is a conscious action, X has updated and I want to bring that change(s) in.

cd submodule, update, test, commit.

I haven't seen anything in this thread that really motivates me to learn another bespoke tool just for this. I'm sure it varies for different projects though.

Fast forward 15 years and see how the tooling this thread has been evolved and how many different tools people will have used and compare that to the stackoverflow post. I'm more inclined to invest time in git itself.

I want to update 20+ submodules every day, ensuring i'm always at the tip of all submodules.

    git submodule foreach ………

Or is there something I missed?

> I'm more inclined to invest time in git itself.

This is fine until you're working with hundreds of other developers. I believe the reason solutions like this exist is to abstract git away from most devs, because in (my experience) many enterprise devs have only rudimentary git knowledge.

Sure, the devs should "just learn git" - but the same argument applies to a lot of other tech nowadays. Ultimately most folks seem to want to close their ticket off and move to the next one.

Git submodules and git subtrees generally do not fit my org's needs - we have internal tooling similar to this. Happy to expand on that if you have questions.

The risk with that approach is that every other of the hundreds of developers will bring their own tool for X. So now you have hundreds of tools and everyone only knows a subset.

If there is a common operation that people get wrong or don't use often enough but still need to run regularly a five-line bash script will not only do the job it will actively help them learn the tool they are using.

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