There are a lot of little git scripts and tools being written by a lot of people. Including a lot of tools written by people I have a lot of respect for. And yet, they are mostly useless for me. Take git-pkg. Can’t use it. Does not work with git submodules. Then there is our nice, new, shiny, incredibly bodacious “3.0 (git)” source format. Again, useless: does not cater to submodules.

I like submodules. They are nice. They allow for projects to take upstream sources, add Debian packaging instructions, and put them into git. They allow you to stitch together disparate projects, with different authors, and different release schedules and goals, into a coherent, integrated, software project.

Yes, I use git submodules for my Debian packaging. I think it is conceptually and practically the correct solution. Why submodules? Well, one of the first things I discovered was that most of the packaging for my packages was very similar – but not identical. Unfortunately, the previous incarnation of my packages with a monolithic rules file in each ./debian/ directory, it was easy for the rules files in packages to get out of sync – and there was no easy way to merge changes in the common portions an any sane automated fashion. The ./debian/ directories for all my packages package that they are instrumental in packaging. So, since I make the ./debian/ directories branches of the same project, it is far easier to package a new package, or to roll out a new feature when policy changes – the same commit can be applied across all the branches, and thus all my source packages, easily. With a separate debian-dir project, I can separate the management of the packaging rules from the package code itself.

Also, I have abstracted out the really common bits across all my packages into a ./debian.common directory, which is yet another project, and included in as a submodule in all the packages – so there is a central place to change the common bits, without having to duplicate my efforts 30-odd times.

Now people are complaining since they have no idea how to clone my package repositories, since apparently no one actually pays attention to a file called .gitmodules, and even when they do, they, and the tools they use, have no clue what to do with it. I am tired of sending emails with one off-cluebats, and I am building my own porcelain around something I hope to present as a generic vcs-pkg implementation soon. The firs step is a wrapper around git-clone, that understands git submodules.

So, here is the browsable code (there is a link in there to the downloadable sources too). Complete with a built in man page. Takes the same arguments as git-clone, but with fewer options. Have fun.