Show HN: Vdm, a sane alternative to e.g. Git submodules

https://github.com/fviard/svn_xternals

Despite the README saying that it is a work in progress, the tool is functional for a few years already. Also, again despite the name, it works with GIT.

The idea is to be able to use the concept of "externals" from SVN transparently with svn or GIT. It does something similar to what Google "gclient" was doing but in a more efficient way (ie a lot faster and consuming a lot less resources).

To use it, you just need to create a file ("externals.conf" in your project for example), in a format like that:

externals.conf

   git@github.com:user/myproject_core.git                   myproject/core
   git@github.com:user/myproject_plugins_onething.git       myproject/plugins/onething
   git@github.com:anotheruser/another_thing.git@mybranch    myproject/plugins/another_thing
   git@github.com:corpuser/random_library.git@release-tag-123           myproject/vendor/random_library

And it will take care to do automatically the git clone, or pull, or "switch" if you change a branch/tag indicator in the externals file.

Like that, you can easily commit a externals.conf file in a root project folder, and individually manage the version of sub-components that can be hosted anywhere.

The "externals.conf" file is a plain text file so easily to read and diff to compare different versions of your project.

> This git command clones an external git repo into a subdirectory of your repo. Later on, upstream changes can be pulled in, and local changes can be pushed back. Simple.

https://github.com/ingydotnet/git-subrepo

After trying many similar solutions, it gets the closest to what I want to achieve, which is nested Git repositories. A project with subprojects, each of which can be an independent Git repo with its own history to push/pull, while the project itself has the entire codebase and history.

It's written in Bash, so fairly portable.

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Edit: After skimming through the project vdm, I see the problems it aims to solve are different from what git-subrepo does. The latter is more about monorepos. Ah well, that's what I get for commenting before reading the post.

vdm does look useful for managing a project with external dependencies, which are Git repos owned by others or oneself. Maybe like a language-agnostic package manager.