[bartq]

How submodules should be done properly:

  1) define somewhere in the repo that it's a "compound repo", a "workspace" etc - name is arbitrary, This is our repo "R",
  2) for certain paths in the repo, mark those paths as an aliases to other repos identified by a repository URL/path. These our "r" repos.
  3) for every git command executed inside repo "R", run appropriate commands in the background for each "r" repo only if repo "r" was affected by changes initiated in repo "R".
  4) If you made changes to repo "r" directly and then returned to "R", after "git pull" you should see nothing else than standard git diffs, conflicts etc. You should not run anything like "sync"/"refresh" etc. Only git pull/rebase/merge etc.
  5) Commit in repo "R" which is only responsible for bumping repos "r" should be handled by git submodule system transparently for the user of "R". I'm not a git expert to tell what kind of commit should be used here. Any ideas? You should commit seeing diffs of course, not some commits hashes.
  5) THAT'S IT.

Everything should work recursively, e.i. you should be able to do 10 layers of "r" repos. Each n-th "r" repo acts as "R" repo for n+1 level repo. Ten fold commit should work like transaction, e.g. if any of layers between 1 and 10 has failing precommit hook - the whole operation should fail.

Please help me find potential problems. thx!