how to checkout proper submodules

[Simon Marlow]

On 05/06/13 16:59, Ian Lynagh wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 04, 2013 at 09:05:58PM -0500, Austin Seipp wrote:
>>
>> I know we had this discussion sometime recently I think, but can
>> someone *please* explain why we are in this situation of half
>> submodules, half random-floating-git-repository-checkouts?
>
> Submodules are very handy for libraries that someone else maintains: We
> can make a local change to the library when we need something fixed,
> and then, when upstream has a fix too, we can jump straight to their fix
> without having to do any merging.
>
> However, submodules have various disadvantages, e.g.
>      http://codingkilledthecat.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/why-your-company-shouldnt-use-git-submodules/
>
> The main one for me is that it's fairly easy to lose local changes when
> using submodules. This is relatively unimportant for the libraries that
> someone else maintains, as we don't often make any local changes to
> lose. Even so, I've lost changes on a couple of occasions.

Drive-by-comment: 'sync-all new' doesn't work since we switched to 
submodules.  If someone could fix that I'd be very grateful (or 
alternatively tell me what workflow you use to figure out what patches 
you have in your local repos that aren't upstream).

Another thing that annoys me about submodules is that I like to keep a 
local mirror of the GHC repos on my computer.  When I clone from it, the 
submodules all come from darcs.haskell.org instead of my local mirror. 
I know how to fix this by hand, but it's sync-all's job to get this 
right (it does for the other repos).

Cheers,
	Simon


> So the reason we entered this state is that we didn't think the
> advantages outweighed the disadvantages for the other repositories.
>
>
> Thanks
> Ian
>