[Xcb] A question about XCB's Git repository layout

[Robert Bragg]

Hello,

Jamey has asked me to forward this question here so everyone can
"fight it out"

<quote>
Basically I have been trying to put together a jhbuild moduleset for
X.org that will pull e.g. libX11 and XCB from their new git
repositories.

This has gone smoothly for all git repositories except XCBs :-)

The reason stems from the facts that git doesn't seem to let you clone
arbitrary subdirectories of a repository, and jhbuild assumes that
there will be a autogen.sh at the top of any repository you ask it to
check out.

To work around this locally I wrote a small patch for jhbuild that
lets you optionally specify a particular subdirectory of a repository
to find the autogen.sh, and that seems to work nicely for me.

I have passed the patch on to James Henstridge, but in his reply to me
he had wondered if the layout of the XCB repository was ideal and if
it could be changed. Suggesting that perhaps having separate
repositories for each module might make it easier to deal with actions
such as branching/merging. A minor issue I see myself is just that of
consistency with other x.org git modules. (Probably a bit early to
talk about consistency but e.g. libXrandr and randrproto are in
seperate git repositories.)

On the other hand I suppose having separate repositories would require
multiple check-in/merge procedures for widespread changes. If the
sub-modules are tightly coupled by nature - making such changes common
- I could see an advantage to a single repository. Interestingly if I
understood James correctly he was suggesting that the opposite - being
able to merge such widespread changes piecemeal - might be preferable,
so this may all be a game of pros and cons and those with the biggest
fists win.

I'm just curious to know if this has been considered before and
perhaps if there are other reasons to keep it as is or otherwise?
</quote>

Finally; this was Jamey's initial response to kick things off:

> My first reaction is, "That would be painful for us and jhbuild shouldn't
> assume that anyway," but I'd like advice from others...

kind regards,
-- Robert