Third-Party Code and Git

Question

When developing iOS applications, I frequently use third-party code from GitHub and reusable classes I created myself. What I have been doing is cloning the source code into a specific folder somewhere in ~/Documents, where I kept all the library code. Then I would drag the source files into the Xcode project and code away, with a local Git repository keeping track of the changes in my own source code. So far so good, but I recently found a severe problem: I wanted to switch back to a older version of my Xcode project and found that it did not compile anymore because it used an older version of the third-party code, and nowhere had I stored which version it used!

How is this problem usually solved? I have looked briefly into Git submodules, but I'm not sure if it's the right thing. I also briefly read about CocoaPods, but could I also use that for libraries I created myself?

Answer 1

It is actually solved with git submodule: the idea is to reference an exact commit for each submodule you need, allowing you to go back in the history, and find the coherent set of commits you need for your project to compile then.
(More in this answer)

However, that does require a slight change in your working tree structure, since each submodule would become sub-directories of the parent repo which represents your project.

Note also that it (git submodule) is useful for source dependencies.
CocoaPods would be more for building the binaries you depend on (binary dependency).