Re: [PATCH] Install autoconf as a submodule to get m4sugar.

[Akim Demaille]

Le 21 déc. 08 à 14:20, Ralf Wildenhues a écrit :

> > Will do.  Can you just confirm that "git submodule update --init"  
> > does
> > what you need?
>
> That looks better.  Is there however a way to avoid having duplicated
> checked-out repos?

I don't know.  That would be nice, indeed.  I, too, have several  
copies of the same repo.  It would be nice to simply have a local  
cache to remote repositories, something transparent.

> I have git trees of Autoconf and Gnulib lying around
> here, I don't necessarily want them another time.  Should I just  
> remove
> those repos again and turn the directories into symlinks?  If that is
> ok, then maybe that could be documented as an alternative, too.

I'm afraid git submodule might not like that, but I might be wrong.   
Never tried.  I got used to have several repositories replicated on my  
machine.  For a start, I find it simpler this way to deal with  
different alive branches: I have several clones in different  
directories instead of a single repository which branch I would change  
often.

> BTW, I should have been more explicit in the above: please fix the
> savannah bison pages to not show the CVS tree for the code any more,
> and let README-hacking point to the savannah git page for bison.

Ah, thanks for the prompt, I had not realized the pages were outdated.

> > Submodules are not as easy to use as svn externals, unfortunately.
>
> Dunno, I've not needed the latter much either.

They are really a nice way to factor common bits, such as gnulib.  In  
some projects of ours, we just "subscribe" to maintainer tools we  
need, such as Bison, in order not to have dependency problems.  It  
also makes it much easier to "arrive" on a fresh machine.