Hi,
when I recently thought about submodule support, I had the
idea that it is easier to get it by going in small,
incremental steps, introducing usefull subfeatures on their
on while on it.
The following is one outcome of this, a proposal for
light-weight checkouts of git branches, without the need
to have to full repository in a .git subdirectory, but
the just have a file .gitlink is simple as possible, which
manages the link to the real repository.
Of course, this feature is tailored to support checkouts of
submodules as being such light-weight checkouts themself.
The current proposal just says that light-weight checkouts
should be ignored when existing inside of another checkout.
For real submodule support, we would want to be able the
do a "git add" on these light-weight checkouts (which of
course are bound to some commit), and on "git commit", this
would add a "submodule object" at this place into the tree
of the outer repository.
Comments?
Josef
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Support for multiple external light-weight checkouts
aka ".gitlink" proposal
Main ideas behind light-weight checkouts
----------------------------------------
Make submodules easier to implement by separating
part of the needed infrastructure into a independent,
yet useful feature
(1) Allow to separate a branch checkout from its repository location
on the local filesystem. This minimally needs to be only _one_ file,
called ".gitlink" here. One should be able to move the
checkout directory around (within some limits) without breaking
the link to its "base" repository.
We want this later for submodule checkouts inside of a supermodule
checkout: (a) to not loose the objects+index+HEAD if the user
removes the whole checkout to remove the submodule in next
supermodule commit; (b) to allow for moving submodules around
between supermodule commits.
This can be implemented with a small script reading .gitlink and setting
up $GITDIR and ...
