Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 64 posts

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

#51

Post by prpl »

I think you’re going to find that, out there, somebody has already built this. I’ve built one, and worked on two others that somebody built. Usually they have names like workspace manager or repo manager or whatever. Most will probably have something to build a dag and code to do a topological sort for the recursive projects. The better ones will use the topological sort to pull repos and build in parallel.

In addition, other tools can also do this to varying degrees of success, like Bazel and cmake.

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

#52

Post by quilombodigital »

To me, the biggest indicator that all the links being posted here about Git submodule systems come from people who don't know what they're doing is the fact that all of them (vdm, pasta, peru, git-aggregator, etc.) are using YAML as a config. Anyone who has worked at least a few years with Git and YAML knows that this type of file is not Git/diff friendly. I've seen too many disastrous merges, and the developers in the company have to keep using unityyamlmerge to resolve a foolish decision by Unity. Moreover, if anyone here has tried to parse YAML, they understand how unnecessary it is to use this format 99% of the time. In your case, the only advice I can give is to use a complete repo config per line, so it doesn't spread across different lines. This ensures the atomicity and integrity of your information.

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

#54

Post by keithnz »

I quite like https://github.com/ingydotnet/git-subrepo

This allows you to treat common code in a repo as just a normal part of the repo. However, the common code is also in a repo of its own. This tool then allows you to push / merge your changes back to the common repo.

Check the git page for a list of the benefits.

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

#55

Post by __m »

glandium wrote: post #40

Probably unpopular opinion: git submodules are just fine. They're "just" lacking a consistent UI. They have improved over the years, but the default config sucks because the defaults emulate the original, awful, UX. With proper configuration, it's much better, although there are still pain points (like rebase conflicts in non-submodule parts messing things up if you don't git submodule update)

What I don't like about submodules is that they are centralised, you can't just easily migrate to another server without having them still point to the old one, the urls are version controlled. I since then moved to packages.

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

#56

Post by t_believ-er873 »

Nice! As an alternative backup tool, you can look at GitProtect Backup & Disaster Recovery for GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab. It allows you to pick up the storage (Cloud/local or both), automate backups by scheduling them at the most appropriate time, avoiding throttling, and restore data immediately from any point in time in case of failure, and many other features that meet pain points.

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

#58

Post by juped »

quilombodigital wrote: post #52

To me, the biggest indicator that all the links being posted here about Git submodule systems come from people who don't know what they're doing is the fact that all of them (vdm, pasta, peru, git-aggregator, etc.) are using YAML as a config. Anyone who has worked at least a few years with Git and YAML knows that this type of file is not Git/diff friendly. I've seen too many disastrous merges, and the developers in t…

I never thought of that before, but it's a good point.

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

#59

Post by vilunov »

glandium wrote: post #40

Probably unpopular opinion: git submodules are just fine. They're "just" lacking a consistent UI. They have improved over the years, but the default config sucks because the defaults emulate the original, awful, UX. With proper configuration, it's much better, although there are still pain points (like rebase conflicts in non-submodule parts messing things up if you don't git submodule update)

If they don't have a consistent UI and emulate the original awful UX, then in what aspect are they nice?

They have a ton of problems in my experience, a few off the top of my head:

- They force the specific repo url, e.g. ssh github even if you prefer to clone by http.

- Pulling from remote becomes difficult when submodules change, e.g. when a submodule is merged into main repo and becomes a proper subdir.

- git commands such as `git checkout -- .` don't work properly on them and I don't see how configs could change that.

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

#60

Post by esafak »

quilombodigital wrote: post #52

To me, the biggest indicator that all the links being posted here about Git submodule systems come from people who don't know what they're doing is the fact that all of them (vdm, pasta, peru, git-aggregator, etc.) are using YAML as a config. Anyone who has worked at least a few years with Git and YAML knows that this type of file is not Git/diff friendly. I've seen too many disastrous merges, and the developers in t…

What config format do you recommend?
Post reply on HN