The shaving of yaks

A day ago, a month ago (time no longer has real meaning anymore), I was ask to look into moving our code away from SVN (Subversion) [1] and into git [2]. Ever since I've been pretty much busy with the shaving of yaks [3]—lots and lots of yaks.

And it's more than just converting a repository of code from SVN to git—it's also breaking up what is basically a monorepos [4] into lots of separate repos for reasons (operations hates having to checkout the 800 pound gorilla for the 4 oz. banana). And without losing history if at all possible.

Lots of yaks to shave in this project.

So I've been learning about submodules in git and while I like git, I'm not a fan of the submodule. First, when you clone a repository with submodules (git clone https://git.example.com/foo.git) you don't get the submodules. That's another two steps to get them (git submodule init; git submodule update). I solved that issue with a new Makefile target:

getmod:
        git submodule init
        git submodule update

And on the build system, I made sure that make getmod was done prior to make. That issue solved.

Another issue—we use Lua [5] in our department, but we ended up with using two different versions. The stuff I built is still using 5.1.5, while a new project a fellow cow-orker wrote used 5.3.2. This is a chance to consolidate some dependencies, and to that end, I have a new single Lua repo with every version of Lua from 5.1.4 to 5.3.5 (with all the patches [6] applied). But as I found out (and many yaks were shaved to bring me this information) you can't just checkout a particular tag or branch for a submodule.

Grrrrrr.

So I solved that issue in the Makefile as well:

VLUA := $(shell cd deps/lua ; git describe --tag)

ifneq ($(VLUA),"5.1.5.p2")
  DUMMY := $(shell cd deps/lua; git checkout 5.1.5.p2)
endif

This checks to see which version of Lua is checked out, and if it's not the one I want, check out the version I do want. I also had to make sure the .gitmodule file had ignore = all set:

[submodule "deps/lua"]
        path = deps/lua
        url = https://git.example.com/lua.git
        ignore = all

to prevent git status from freaking people out.

I figure this will keep me busy for the next few months at least. Or maybe days. Time just flows strangely these days.

[1] https://subversion.apache.org/

[2] https://git-scm.com/

[3] http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monorepo

[5] https://www.lua.org/

[6] https://www.lua.org/bugs.html

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