Re: gnulib via submodule

[John Darrington]

On Thu, Sep 03, 2020 at 06:02:13PM -0300, Michel Boaventura wrote:
     I really like the idea. I've worked on a lot of opensource projects and 
most of
     them use git submodules.

So have I.    But personally I don't like this feature of git.

I continually find that I inadvertently reset the submodule to the wrong
commit.  This is partly due to my habit of commiting using "git commit -a".
And when the submodule needs to be updated in people's local repositories it is
also not simple for them to do so.

     On 20/09/03 01:01PM, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     > Git has a feature called a "submodule" that allows one to add a specific
     > commit of a repository in a subdirectory. This might be a better way for
     > PSPP to integrate with gnulib, since PSPP demands a specific commit
     > of gnulib. Git would then take over some of the work that developers and
     > builders have to do manually (reading README.Git to find out the
     > correct commit).

We've been using the README.Git method for a long time now.   Existing 
developers
do not have any problems with it so far as I'm aware.    As for "builders",  if
they choose to build directly from Git, I think issue is the least of their
worries.   They will also have a lot more thinks to install - many of which must
be at particular versions - such as automake, autoconf, gperf, gimp, texinfo, 
etc.
It is indeed awkward - that is why the recommended way is to build from a 
tarball.

One thing that perhaps we could consider is arranging for an error/warning if 
the
gnulib head does not match that mentioned in README.Git

J'