I've found that vcstool[0] is the better solution for your first example and have been using it extensively both in personal and company projects without any is

I've found that vcstool[0] is the better solution for your first example and have been using it extensively both in personal and company projects without any issues, except on occasion forgetting to commit some subpackage changes as git sometimes doesn't indicate untracked changes correctly. The principle is similar but with explicit repos and branches defined in a config file that can then be pulled or cloned as one. [0] https://github.com/dirk-thomas/vcstool https://github.com/dirk-thomas/vcstool