fenics team mailing list archive

[Roland Siegbert <roland.siegbert@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

just reading through the discussion, my impression is, that you are 
looking for something like git submodule [1] to ease the packaging 
process, deducing from what Anders wrote. The pros and cons are laid out 
nicely in Martin's blueprint [2].

After a bit of searching, I found a corresponding feature in bzr, called 
"nested trees" [3]. Maybe it makes sense to wait until Canonical 
releases it?

In git, the corresponding workflow would be:

git clone repo-easing-packaging
git submodule init (tell repo-easing-packaging about dependency-repos)
git submodule update (fetch dependency-repos in the working state)

this ensures, that repo-easing-packaging will always work.

Imagine now, there are changes in any of the dependency-repos, than you 
can fetch them like so:

git submodule foreach git pull origin master

and test against the changes and adjust repo-easing-packaging accordingly.

At my workplace we currently have the problem that we ran into the issue 
of having one big repo containing many should-be-orthogonal software 
pieces and now we have to untangle them and integrate them using 
submodules to ease deployment because it's tangled, heavy to use and clumsy.

Hope I could help and excuse my probably cheeky jump into that 
discussion. Just discovered this project a few days ago and bought the 
fenicsbook this week. :-)

Best,

Roland




[1]: http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Tools-Submodules

tl;dr: Basically a "mother repo" can pull and track "associated children 
repos".

[2]: 
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/fenics/+spec/combine-projects-into-one-repository

[3]: 
http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/foreign/bzr-on-git-projects.html