VSCode tracking git repos in subdirectories of dev container

Question

I and my colleagues have interest in developing a common vscode dev container and having it as part of our gitlab, in order to make the development more consistent as well as help with onboarding. Note, this is for ros development, for what difference it makes.

So for this we have our vscode_workspace container repo, this consists of

• ros_ws/
  • .devcontainer/
    • devcontainer.json
    • dockerfile
  • .git/
  • .vscode/
    • c_cpp_properties.json
    • launch.json
    • settings.json
    • tasks.json
  • build/
  • install/
  • log/
  • src/
    • pkg1/
      • .git/
      • include/
      • src/

Of course, the vscode_workspace is a git repo in itself, but we aren't interested in tracking it while developing code. The src directory contains many git repos, each for a different package we're developing.

Is there any way to include tracking of the subdirectories of src in the vscode source control window? Disabling tracking the container while developing would be convenient, but the focus is mostly on being able to track changes on the various repos in the src directory.

Answer 1

.git in .git sound like a use for Git submodules, which works well for tracking.

Git Tools - Submodules

GitLab: Configure the .gitmodules file