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git submodules have ruined my life on multiple teams enough to never want them. They're good enough for a dev team of 2-3 but don't scale very well. git subtree

by duped 3y ago

git submodules have ruined my life on multiple teams enough to never want them. They're good enough for a dev team of 2-3 but don't scale very well. git subtree can be a bit better. But ultimately you probably want a working package manager.

eonwe 3y ago
I've heard this often. Why don't they scale? I used them for some years for a team of ten or so people who all first had to learn to understand how they worked so might that be the problem?
- rtpg 3y ago
  It’s just annoying? Especially if you have access to everything, at one point just having a monorepo makes git “actually work”.
- duped 3y ago
  The configuration of ssh vs https can break a lot of workflows, the inability to (reliably) track a branch from a submodule can make maintenance a pain, I've never really figured out how to reasonably do a rebase in the presence of gitmodules changes on both branches, github actions had broken support for submodules for quite awhile... just to name a few. There's not one giant issue with submodules. There are dozens of small annoyances and footguns. I have yet to see a problem that is better solved by git submodules that can't be solved another way.
torstenvl 3y ago
Using git subtree for dependencies is completely unworkable for two interrelated reasons: (1) There's no recursive option; each dependency has to be pulled/pushed/etc. manually. (2) Each manual pull/push/etc. of a subtree has to be explicitly path-specified and remote-specified. There's just no easy way to `git subtree pull --prefix=specificdependencysubdir https://github.com/whatever/gadgets https://github.com/whatever/gadgets main --squash` for each of your dependencies, and each of their dependencies, etc. It's a tedious manual process for everything. Best case scenario, you make a .PHONY target of `updatesubtrees` and manually keep it up to date with the directory structure and remote URLs of each dependency.

by duped 3y ago

eonwe 3y ago

I've heard this often. Why don't they scale? I used them for some years for a team of ten or so people who all first had to learn to understand how they worked so might that be the problem?

rtpg 3y ago
It’s just annoying? Especially if you have access to everything, at one point just having a monorepo makes git “actually work”.
duped 3y ago
The configuration of ssh vs https can break a lot of workflows, the inability to (reliably) track a branch from a submodule can make maintenance a pain, I've never really figured out how to reasonably do a rebase in the presence of gitmodules changes on both branches, github actions had broken support for submodules for quite awhile... just to name a few. There's not one giant issue with submodules. There are dozens of small annoyances and footguns. I have yet to see a problem that is better solved by git submodules that can't be solved another way.

torstenvl 3y ago

Using git subtree for dependencies is completely unworkable for two interrelated reasons: (1) There's no recursive option; each dependency has to be pulled/pushed/etc. manually. (2) Each manual pull/push/etc. of a subtree has to be explicitly path-specified and remote-specified. There's just no easy way to `git subtree pull --prefix=specificdependencysubdir https://github.com/whatever/gadgets https://github.com/whatever/gadgets main --squash` for each of your dependencies, and each of their dependencies, etc. It's a tedious manual process for everything. Best case scenario, you make a .PHONY target of `updatesubtrees` and manually keep it up to date with the directory structure and remote URLs of each dependency.