[Mesa-dev] Moving amdgpu/addrlib into a git submodule

[Nicolai Hähnle]

On 09.08.2016 18:22, Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 4:59 PM, Nicolai Hähnle <nhaehnle at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 09.08.2016 15:58, Rob Clark wrote:
>>>
>>> tbh, git submodules are more annoying than they need to be, and I'm
>>> not really terribly excited to use that for something that is a build
>>> dependency.  Maybe just move it into libdrm instead?
>>
>>
>> I know. That's what I would have proposed if the addrlib interface were
>> stable. Unfortunately it isn't, and realistically speaking, that's not going
>> to change.
>>
>> So shared linking is right out.
>>
>> Static linking or just including source files from a separate repository
>> could be considered, but then what's the process for ensuring you have the
>> right version?
>>
>> The nice aspect of submodules is that every commit of the Mesa repository
>> "knows" what the corresponding right version of addrlib is, and so git can
>> update the submodule to the correct version for you automatically.
>
> I'm not a huge fan of submodules either. They just don't deal with
> distributed development properly, which should be a non-starter for
> OSS IMO. You either set the submodule to point to an absolute URL, in
> which case it's awkward to work with if you need to change the code,
> or you use a relative URL, which forces everyone who has a fork to
> fork the submodule also. Yuck. As a formerly active Git developer, my
> impression is that nobody of the core-git developers really loved the
> idea of git-submodule, it was mostly introduced into Git to help KDE
> transition their gigantic SVN-external based source tree to Git.
>
> IMO, a much better alternative would be to have addrlib live in its
> own repository, and periodically do a git subtree-merge into mesa and
> other dependent system. That means that nobody really needs to deal
> with the fact that the upstream is in a different repo, except when
> submitting patches for upstream. This is what git.git itself does for
> some of its subsystems.

That looks interesting. Are people using subtree-merge with the kind of 
linear history that Mesa uses?

Nicolai

>