Sub-tree and pull requests?

[Andre-John Mas]

We have a project that is composed of modules (or plugins). At the moment each plugin is part of the main product repository, but I have now been asked to move these into their own repos. This fine on the surface, but sometimes these modules have build time dependencies with each other, since a change in one depends on a change in another. Working with one repo this causes no issues, but I am worried this will break pull-requests and continuous integration with Jenkins (we use Jenkins to validate pull-requests), once have moved things. The question is whether git sub-tree can allow this to work seamlessly in Atlassian Stash, taking into account pull-requests and Jenkins? The last thing I want is a required pull-request being merged after it's dependant.

[cofarrell · Accepted solution]

Hi Andre-John,

That's a good question. If you use git sub-tree, then as far as Stash is concerned you have a single repository and everything, including Jenkins, will continue to work fine. Keep in mind that you may end up 'reviewing' the same code multiple time, depending on how/where you import your modules/plugins.

If you were talking about git submodules then I'm afraid the answer would be less satisfactory, as we don't (yet) have cross-repository pull requests. Jenkins/Bamboo shoudl be able to build/clone repositories with submodules though.

Dependency management with Git is an area that I don't think has been solved by anyone satisfactory yet - you might be interested in this recent blog from a colleague of mine.

Best of luck.

Charle