Hi Eric, Bruno, On Tue, 16 Mar 2010, Eric Blake wrote:
> Indeed, bison already uses multiple submodules (gnulib and autoconf), > and has done for more than a year. It may be worth getting Joel's > opinions here, as the maintainer of the only GNU package that I am aware > of that currently tracks multiple submodules. Akim actually set that up, so maybe he has some input. I haven't been following bug-gnulib carefully, so I may be missing some background. I just re-read this thread more carefully, and I got a little lost in places. I can't always tell when you guys mean "update" as in "git submodule update" or as in "checkout a newer submodule commit". In either sense, obviously there are times when you want to update one submodule but not another. However, I so far haven't seen an argument about why bootstrap should give gnulib special treatment in this regard. Anyway, my habit is to set up submodules the way I want them before running bootstrap, so this bootstrap feature held little benefit for me in the first place. (People who don't use bison.git regularly might like it though.) Moreover, I frequently forget that bootstrap will revert my checkout of newer commits in the submodules if I forget to run, for example, "git add -u gnulib". I don't recall bootstrap reverting my changes to any of Bison's other files, so it's unintuitive that submodules are different. I wish bootstrap could somehow leave non-empty submodules alone.
