Re: [Monotone-devel] Sharing subprojects between projects

[Ludovic Brenta]

Richard Levitte <address@hidden> writes:
> ludovic> I used Monotone's merge_into_dir for that purpose once.  I
> ludovic> suggest you have a look at it.
>
> It's true that it's (well, it and the subsequent propagates) the most
> supported way to do this.  The flip side of the coin is that it
> requires that maintainers of the subprojects remember to do the
> subsequent propagates a little now and then, which doesn't scale well
> for popular subprojects (libraries, for example?).
>
> As an alternative, I could easily imagine having a file _MTN/subdirs
> or something like that in the main workspace that describe
> subdirectories that need to be treated as separate workspaces in a way
> that's transparent to the user.  Unfortunately, that would require
> that each user is informed of the relationship between projects and
> "install" subdirectories manually.  The real beef is having that kind
> of information in a distributed way, so whenever a project is checked
> out or updated, that kind of information, as well as the
> subdirectories themselves, get checked out or updated automagically.

This seems like a nice idea.  For now, it is possible to have the
information in a README file, provided the person who does a
merge_into_dir for a new subproject remembers to update it.

> Yet another possibility is to have the subsequent propagates that done
> automagically instead of manually, as is done today.  I wonder,
> though, if that's such a smart idea...  It *could* be done through
> some of the hooks, of course...

I'm reluctant to accept automatic propagates to and from subprojects.
I think these should be manual, and done only when the master project
wants to upgrade to a newer release of a library, or when a bug fix to
a library was committed from within the master project.

For example, monotone uses SQLite but probably doesn't want every
commit to SQLite to propagate automatically into Monotone, does it?

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.