Status

bent depend feature idea currently abandoned. The development time required to polish this feature is not worthwhile for me (Reed), personally.

Depend on arbitrary files from another repo

0. start on source branch (your own library, which depends upon a different repo)

1. new branch (depend_branch) to point to external repo

2. delete all files (except .git folder)

3. commit

4. switch back to source branch

5. git merge depend_branch -s ours

6. switch to depend_branch

7. git pull https://depend_url.com/whatever.git target_branch_name --allow-unrelated-histories

   • may want a nocommit flag (but probably not)

8. switch to source_branch

9. git merge depend_branch

10. switch to depend_branch

11. wait for changes on the target

12. Run the git pull https://def.com/abc.git command above

13. Should be up to date

14. switch to source branch

15. git merge depend_branch

16. Edit one of the files that is depended upon

17. Idk yet

    • I think git merge -s ours keeps the non-existed files from merging, but it also stops the modified file from merging
    • I think I just need to git merge -s --no-commit, delete every file that is added (I think I have an internal function that'll list all modified files & should be easy to filter from there). Then commit
    • Not 100% sure what this will do for the merge back in

This whole workflow....

It might be better to simply git clone the target repo into a local cache directory Then copy+paste files from there into my depend branch But this will create problems when fast-forwarding & trying to keep local changes & remote changes in-sync

Ok... so...

I have one branch that is an exact copy of my target I have a 2nd branch which is filtered to only have the files I need from the target Then I have the source branch with the library code

The source branch merges into/from the filtered depend branch The filtered depend branch merges into & from the pure branch

The only thing I don't like about all of this is... Adding extra branches is clutter & I don't like clutter!!!

So I could make the depend process a local-only thing... but that would undoubtedly cause issues. Merge conflicts at some distant point down the line.