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

[Nicolai Hähnle]

On 09.08.2016 22:12, Dave Airlie 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've only had to use git submodules once with spice project, and it
> was a nightmare. It makes packaging etc a real pita.

It would be nice to have something more concrete to go on, like what are 
the problems _really_ :)


> Alternatives are something like a fetch external sources script,
> that does git submodules but does it better, you'll see Vulkan-CTS
> etc use something like that, it would have to be integrated with
> the build system a bit better though.

What pain do submodules give you that wouldn't be even _worse_ with a 
separate script for fetching external sources?


Look, there are a bunch of different use cases here. Distro packagers; 
Mesa contributors and bleeding-edge users; and us (which is slightly 
separate because we're not _just_ Mesa contributors but have parts of 
the stack elsewhere, which is why this is coming up in the first place).

Most of the complaints seem to come from distro packaging, though I have 
yet to understand what the exact problems are.

For Mesa contributors and users, I'd really like to avoid the hassle of 
having to get another repository manually.

For us, in addition to avoiding the same hassles there's the question of 
maintainability, and perhaps (with a huge load of optimism) getting the 
closed source folks a bit more involved in the fact that there's another 
world out here as well.

On those axes, I've seen one alternative suggestion that makes sense to 
me, and that is subtree-merges. I have to play with them a bit, but the 
initial impression is good. They seem like a more git-like solution. 
That would also be something new for Mesa, though, since it would mean 
more exceptions to the otherwise linear history.

Nicolai