[development] Git best practices for client codebases

[Gábor Hojtsy]

On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 7:10 AM, Sam Boyer <drupal at samboyer.org> wrote:
>> Also, if you want to manage both core and contrib modules that way it
>> means you are now using git submodules, which it's generally agreed suck
>> AFAIK, or complex sub-tree merging that is out of reach of 99% of
>> developers.  Hell, I've done it and I don't want to do it. :-)
>
> Git submodules don't suck across the board. They only suck if you try to
> use them for the wrong purpose - namely, general dev. Which is what most
> people try to use them for, and then get frustrated. However, they can
> be *very* effective as part of a strategy for developing a real client
> site, where you actually do want to record submodule updates in the
> parent repo (e.g., when you update a set of modules from upstream, you
> reflect that in the parent repo with a commit of all the updated
> submodules).
>
> Yes, subtrees are a doozy that don't ever enter most folks' repertoire.
> But plain, nested git repos (that just ignore each other) works
> delightfully well. They can't rebuild themselves on new servers, but if
> your deployment strategy is rsync, that's moot.

Well, it would be good to document the suggestion for "nested git
trees with gitignores" as a best practice if you think it is, because
last I've asked on #gitsupport, subrepos were suggested as per
http://freso.dk/en/2011/02/26/managing_fresodk_from_cvs_in_svn_to_git
(no they did not add that they suck :). The guide currently linked
from the main Git docs page for site builders
(http://drupal.org/node/803746) is very outdated (assumes contrib is
in CVS, and generally that you use a git repo mirrored from CVS), and
developers flock to blog posts like that which seem to be up to date
and supposedly contain best practice suggestions.

Gábor