I feel that using Git submodules is somehow troublesome for my development workflow. I've heard about Git subtree and Gitslave.
Git submodules may look powerful or cool upfront, but for all the reasons above it is a bad idea to share code using submodules, especially when the code changes frequently. It will be much worse when you have more and more developers working on the same repos.
Git submodules allow you to keep a git repository as a subdirectory of another git repository. Git submodules are simply a reference to another repository at a particular snapshot in time. Git submodules enable a Git repository to incorporate and track version history of external code.
Specify the prefix local directory into which you want to pull the subtree. Specify the remote repository URL [of the subtree being pulled in] Specify the remote branch [of the subtree being pulled in] Specify you want to squash all the remote repository's [the subtree's] logs.
Which is best for you depends on your needs, desires, and workflow. They are in some senses semi-isomorphic, it is just some are a lot easier to use than others for specific tasks.
gitslave is useful when you control and develop on the subprojects at more of less the same time as the superproject, and furthermore when you typically want to tag, branch, push, pull, etc all repositories at the same time. gitslave has never been tested on windows that I know of. It requires perl.
git-submodule is better when you do not control the subprojects or more specifically wish to fix the subproject at a specific revision even as the subproject changes. git-submodule is a standard part of git and thus would work on windows.
git-subtree provides a front-end to git's built-in subtree merge strategy. It is better when you prefer to have a single-repository "unified" git history. Unlike the subtree merge strategy, it is easier to export changes to the different (directory) trees back out to the original project, but it is not as automatic as it is with gitslave or even git-submodule.
repo is in theory similar to gitslave, but not as well documented for non-android operations that I have found. It is fairly dedicated to the Google Android development model and only natively supports a handful of git commands (though you can run arbitrary commands) and the limited native support doesn't support, for example, a centralized repository to push to and checking out a branch seems fairly difficult.
kitenet's mr is what you would want to use if you have multiple version control systems in use, but is mostly limited for git-only superprojects due to its lowest common denominator approach. There are ways to run arbitrary commands, but they are not as well integrated.
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