git multiple repository management

Question

I am working on a project where we manage external libs/headers and qa with git. Here is what every developers' directory structure looks like:

~/dev/proj 
~/dev/ext 
~/dev/qa

proj, ext and qa are different git repositories. Under svn, synchronization of these dirs was simple: a single update under ~/dev would update all of them recursively. With git, we need to do 'git pull' separately for each dir. This is not nice; someone will always forget to update (git pull) one of these dirs and his project will be out of sync (e.g. new qa will not pass with old code). I looked into 'git submodules' and it doesn't provide a single point for 'git pull' to update these three separate modules at the same time [Correction: I was wrong here but please read my answer below].

You could argue that we should have put proj, ext and qa under the same git repository but I thought that would have been against the git philosophy of keeping different concepts in different repositories.

Does anyone have a solution (other than writing a script to do git pull on every dir under ~/dev) to this trivial problem?

Thanks,

Altan

Answer 1

My philosophy is this: if I will always need to pull X and Y together, then logically they belong in the same repository. Using submodules only makes sense if there is appropriate isolation - think external vendor libraries where you don't want to have updates brought in willy nilly and you don't want your team able to edit them directly - that makes sense. But still, it adds steps no matter how you slice it. I for one stick to "put it in one repository if it's one project", regardless of how I might theoretically break it up to be more "git-like".