The Battle for Sub-premacy - Git Merge 2017

Submodules or Subtrees? Both are proposed by Hector Alfaro and Kyle Macey as solutions for handling dependencies with Git. In this session the gloves are coming off, which one will win it all?

About GitMerge

[theresnothinghere]

I can't think of a more awkward way to communicate this information than the one you guys chose. Bravo.

[mathiasfantoni]

The lack of preparation for this presentation made it too confusing for me to make a decision about submodules vs subtrees. It would've been nice if you had written down in order which commands to use so you wouldn't have to improvise so much and use wrong commands and fill up the terminal window with things, and you could've also aligned those windows better. But most importantly of all, how do submodules and subtrees look in the Github UI? Are they separate repositories, or are they included in the main repository? – I rather like having separate repositories, so that I can clone my main repository, then clone my other repositories into the same folder as my main repository clone, so that the main one acts as a framework, and I can simply develop and push to the other repositories without touching the main repository – except if I need to make adjustments so it better holds the other repositories.

[denizcancgsar]

I use subtree like submodule.. Checking out a single repo is much easier.. For push/pull adding scrips into the project makes it easier to use.. For instance Scripts/push module1 develop or Scrips/pull module2 master etc.

I've been developing for different MCU platforms with common code. For instance the 'core' module has cross platform code, lpc17 has lpc17 dependent code,  cm3 is for Cortex-m3 etc.. They depend on each other as well.. With subtree it is easier to work on features in those sets.. If you want to start working on a featureset across the submodules you have to create branches on those modules, and than track them until the feature is completed.. With subtrees you just create a branch on the root, implement the feature, then push the subtrees.. Much more convenient..