[aur-general] [AUR4] Is there a tool for using a single git repo for several packages?

[Eli Schwartz]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 7:52 PM, Justin Dray <justin at dray.be> wrote:

> How will that work for new packages you take maintainership of? I'm not a
> git wizard, but taking a look at the stuff I can't see any way it merges in
> an external git repo in to yours when you take over an existing orphaned
> package. I tried the submodule thing as well and found it horrible
> inadequate. I was going to just query the AUR to find my package list and
> clone down/update all the returned repositories, and just keep the scripts
> in a repo by itself.
>
> - Justin Dray
>


You can add a git subtree that already existed elsewhere, and then push to
it. :)

The disadvantage is that it creates a subtree merge commit (I despise merge
commits, they're 99% of the time ugly and meaningless) that you see in the
main repo history, and following the previous history can be awkward. See:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10918244/git-subtree-without-squash-view-log

That isn't really a tremendously important issue, as I primarily want to
ensure people can still host on GitHub for contributions, as well as the
one-repo-to-rule-them-all approach just being nicer. But while merge
commits are a necessary evil, I wish at least git was smart enough to
follow the history.