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Ricardo Cristian Ramirez
Ricardo Cristian Ramirez

Reputation: 1224

Managing git repositories with another repository

Linux has lots of git repositories for different modules as listed here. There are also repositories for developers. But how does Linus merge all of these repositories and make a single kernel repository like this? For instance, does he mark as submodule all of the related repositories or what?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 41

Answers (1)

willeM_ Van Onsem
willeM_ Van Onsem

Reputation: 476503

git thinks the opposite way: instead of generating a "master" repository, one generates "children" repositories called submodules.

Say that you have two git repositories that are located at:

foo.bar/baz
quix.qu/foobar

Then you can initialize a parent git repository (for instance in parent):

git init .

and add submodules:

git submodule add foo.bar/baz
git submodule add quix.qu/foobar

It will create the baz and foobar directory and initialize the appropriate git repositories there. The resulting tree is thus something like:

parent
├── baz
│   ├── content of baz
│   └── other content of baz
└── foobar

Submodules are thus what are links (shortcuts) in a non-versioning file system. They are useful if a part of a project tend "to go its own way" and commits are no longer global but you want commits to only capture for instance the plugins directory.

Upvotes: 1

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