fake git repositories.. how far do you go?

[Dieter Plaetinck]

On Thu, 3 Mar 2011 12:21:44 +0000
seanh <snhmnd at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think the happy medium between one big repository and too many small
> ones is to have one default repository for your homedir and a few (but
> not too many) additional repositories for things that don't belong in
> the default repository for some specific reason.
> 
> One big advantage of having most stuff in a single default repo is
> moving it around. If I decide to rearrange some of the top level dirs in
> my homedir, even delete some dirs or add some new ones, or move some
> files from one top-level dir to another, I can do this with git mv etc,
> and the changes will be versioned. If each top-level dir was its own
> repo it would be very awkward to do this sort of thing, you're sort of
> tying yourself in to your top-level organisational decisions. I change
> my mind a lot, so I hate that.

Yep, I agree.  It's just that I had the impression from Martins' and Penny's posts they implied using fake bare git repo's for pretty much every single directory/application, or maybe I missed something.

> One thing I have started using recently is git submodules. Take my
> dotfilemanager script, it's a publicly-available project that has its
> own git repository, but I also want a copy of dotfilemanager to exist in
> my ~/scripts directory, which is on my $PATH, and is versioned in my
> 'default' git repo. I don't want to maintain two copies of the script,
> one in the public dotfilemanager repo and one in my default repo, that
> would be awkward.

I work the other way around, which is much simpler: I add all directories that contain executables I like to my PATH.
So my $PATH contains a lot of code/project_foo directories. It means I cannot leave project code in a broken state, but in practice, this didn't turn out to be a problem.

> So I added the dotfilemanager repo to my default repo as a submodule,
> located at ~/git/default/scripts/_dotfilemanager/, then I added a
> symlink to the default repo: scripts/dotfilemanager ->
> scripts/_dotfilemanager/dotfilemanager.py. The end result is that there
> is only one copy of dotfilemanager, it is versioned seperately in its
> own repo, but there is still a dotfilemanager script in my scripts dir
> and on my path.

Hmm, this seems a bit complicated to me. So for every such code project, you add it as submodule to your main repo, *and* you need to make symlinks for all executables in such submodules?
 
> I now do this with a number of scripts that I wrote for my own personal
> use and want to have in my scripts dir, but that I also want to host in
> a public git repo somewhere.
> 
> http://vimcasts.org/episodes/synchronizing-plugins-with-git-submodules-and-pathogen/
> 
> http://book.git-scm.com/5_submodules.html

interesting, i've now also switched to a submodule/pathogen-based vim setup
(forked from some else actually, https://github.com/Dieterbe/vimfiles)

Dieter