Pulling in code with submodules

[alexveecle]

Hi,

We're looking at josh-filter as a replacement for git subtree and friends¹.

Our intent right now is to incorporate a separate repo into our main repo, preserving history and being able to contribute changes upstream.

However, this repository has submodules itself. My first attempt to incorporate the repo failed, because the submodules were broken (because the submodule references were in //x/.gitmodules).

My thought was just adding the contents of //x/.gitmodules to //.gitmodules, adjusting the paths. I think this will work and should not cause much issues. I would preserve //x/.gitmodules so the repo is kept identical to the original copy. It's a bit ugly, but I think this is the best approach?

I thought about doing text replacement filters, but this seems to be a bit dangerous.

Thoughts?

Álex

Footnotes

1. For our needs, running josh as a daemon does not fit so well, and we found other projects doing similar things. ↩

[alexveecle]

I have been doing tests that look like:

git fetch $REPO_I_WANT_TO_INCORPORATE $BRANCH_I_WANT_TO_INCORPORATE
josh-filter ':prefix=$PATH_IN_THE_MONO_REPO' FETCH_HEAD
git merge --allow-unrelated FILTERED_HEAD
sed s_foo/bar/_$PATH_IN_THE_REPO/foo/bar/_g <$PATH_IN_THE_MONO_REPO/.gitmodules >>.gitmodules
git commit .gitmodules --amend -F - <<EOF
chore: ...
EOF

, that is, in the merge commit I also modify .gitmodules, appending the external repo's .gitmodules, adjusting the paths (hey, it's a kind of a merge conflict, right?).

This seems to work and does not break further invocations of josh-filter.