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

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

#1

Post by ryapric »

Hey folks! I've been working on something on & (mostly) off for a little over a year, and picked it back up recently because of yet another related frustration at work.

I've spent a lot of time ripping out git submodules from repos my teams use, but I've spent an equally large amount of time wondering why there doesn't seem to be a better option for managing arbitrary dependencies across repos in the Year of Our Lord 2024. So, I put together a really early version of such an arbitrary-dependency manager. It's called vdm, and you can find it in the linked URL above & below.

I'm sharing mostly because I'm curious if I'm blatantly missing some other tool that exists that isn't language-specific (like Bit for JS seems to be, for example), but also in case people have any hot-takes or feedback on the functionality as listed in the README.

Also of note is that I'm not sharing to potentially monetize or "generate customer interest" or anything -- I'm just another builder on the internet.

Thanks for looking, and let me know if you have any questions!

vdm: https://github.com/opensourcecorp/vdm

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

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

#3

Post by foooorsyth »

Looks cool! Seems functionally similar to AOSP’s git-repo, but already feels more approachable with that simple yaml remote list.

What collaborative tool would you recommend using with vdm? AOSP has gerrit which is sort of specifically designed for this multi-remote meta setup. GitHub/GitLab don’t play nice with this type of environment.

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

#4

Post by iveqy »

This seems to be almost the same as androids repo tool. https://android.googlesource.com/tools/repo

Personally I don't see the difference between this and submodules. Repo stores the information in xml files, vdm stores it in yaml files and git submodules in the git database. I don't really care.

The real headache for me is the trouble of traceability vs ease of use. You need to specify your dependencies with a sha1 to have traceable SLSA compliant builds, but that also means that you'll need to update all superrepos once a submodule is updated. Gerrit has support for this, but it's not atomic, and what about CI? What about CI that fails?

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

#6

Post by foooorsyth »

iveqy wrote: post #4

This seems to be almost the same as androids repo tool. https://android.googlesource.com/tools/repo Personally I don't see the difference between this and submodules. Repo stores the information in xml files, vdm stores it in yaml files and git submodules in the git database. I don't really care. The real headache for me is the trouble of traceability vs ease of use. You need to specify your dependencies with a sha1…

>I don’t really care

I care about the aesthetics and the convenience that the tool provides. git-repo at least has a simple command to get all the latest stuff (repo sync). Git submodules is a mess in this regard. Just look at this stack overflow thread:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1030169/pull-latest-chan...

People are confused at how to do THE most basic command that you’d have to do every single day with a multi-repo environment. There’s debating in the comments about what flags you should actually use. No thanks.

There’s a lot of room for improvement in this space. git-repo isn’t widely used outside of aosp. Lots of organizations are struggling with proper tooling for this type of setup.

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

#7

Post by comex »

If it just clones the repos and removes the .git directories, then I assume it doesn't keep their commit history? So if you use e.g. `git blame` or `git log` to look at file history, you will see when changes were introduced to the parent repo, but not when/why those changes were made in the first place.

In that respect, it resembles git-subtree with --squash, but differs from git-submodule or regular git-subtree.

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

#8

Post by ryapric »

foooorsyth wrote: post #3

Looks cool! Seems functionally similar to AOSP’s git-repo, but already feels more approachable with that simple yaml remote list. What collaborative tool would you recommend using with vdm? AOSP has gerrit which is sort of specifically designed for this multi-remote meta setup. GitHub/GitLab don’t play nice with this type of environment.

Thanks! That AOSP `repo` tool is one I'd not heard of, so thanks for sharing!

I actually haven't really put much thought into collaborative/mutlirepo development work using vdm -- the original intent was for it to strictly be a retriever of what the user specifies. I think the majority of both my frustration and complexity of other tools is because they're trying to solve for a lot more than at least I personally usually want to use them for. It's like, I just want a `pip install/requirements.txt/go.{mod,sum}` for any kind of tool, not just the language that takes up the majority of my codebase.

One of the thoughts I had, though, was to maybe add a field for each remote section called e.g. `try_local` that takes a filesystem path, and if that doesn't exist then fetch the remote. That way, your development workflow is exactly the same as usual -- developing a dependency is just doing work in the actual repo directory nearby. I'm not married to the idea though. I just REALLY don't want to have it be in the business of managing git-repos-in-git-repos, because vdm isn't really intended to be a Git tool, if that makes sense.

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

#9

Post by ryapric »

38 wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Sure, but not all my code in a single repo is monolingual code, and not all of those languages have cooperative (or existing) package managers. Bash is a great example of something I wish I could stop copy-pasting between repos, and was actually the original motivator for vdm (along with protobuf files, for the same reasons).

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

#10

Post by mafuyu »

foooorsyth wrote: post #3

Looks cool! Seems functionally similar to AOSP’s git-repo, but already feels more approachable with that simple yaml remote list. What collaborative tool would you recommend using with vdm? AOSP has gerrit which is sort of specifically designed for this multi-remote meta setup. GitHub/GitLab don’t play nice with this type of environment.

This tool looks like "submodules, but lighter", while repo is "submodules, but heavier". Looks to me like the motivation is for dependencies that are not hard enough to justify a submodule.

Repo seriously sucks to use, but I also can't imagine many tools living up to AOSP-type workloads without being specifically designed for it. My gripe with repo is that it's really hard to pin the entire repo state if you have a bunch of prototype patches across multiple subrepos. I usually end up having to modify the XML directly.

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