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I have a git repo with nested submodule dependencies (see picture as an example). There are duplications because each repo needs to be compiled standalone in a pipeline so that the corresponding test executable can be run. Currently, this is solved with submodules. If E gets a new commit, I need to

  • update submodule pointer D->E from A->B->D and from A->C->B->D
  • update submodule pointer B->E from A->B and from A->C->B

Which is annoying and makes cloning A take forever, because the whole B branch exists twice. How are structures with nested dependencies like this handled best? Is there an easy way to handle this with binaries?

enter image description here

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    Does A need to have the source code of B and C, or would it be good enough to have a library? What happens if B and D refer to different versions/commits of E?
    – Bart van Ingen Schenau
    Commented Mar 7 at 14:08
  • I actually found this answer to a similar post softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/114719/…, they suggest having empty build repositories which seems to be the best solution
    – Call of Guitar
    Commented Mar 8 at 11:09
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    Does this answer your question? Organizing Git repositories with common nested sub-modules
    – Bart van Ingen Schenau
    Commented Mar 8 at 12:24
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    Every question I see about git submodules always feels like a dependency management problem disguised as a version control problem. I feel like we could answer this question, but I think we need more information about why each submodule needs to be compiled in its own pipeline.
    – Greg Burghardt
    Commented Mar 9 at 2:18
  • And I've always felt like submodules were a dependency management tool smooshed into a version control system that was never built with dependency management in mind.
    – Greg Burghardt
    Commented Mar 9 at 2:20

1 Answer 1

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You've not specified the langauge, but if the submodules are reasonably slow to change and can be versioned separately, then it may make sense to compile them and ship packages.

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  • Not sure why this attracted downvotes?
    – pjc50
    Commented Mar 11 at 17:01

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