ashinn / chibi-snow Goto Github PK

I think submodules are useful when a library is needed to build a package, but is separately managed so that you need to protect against updates that break the root package. Snow isn't separately managed. This is more reasonable for something like a gnulib or libgc dependency, where the package can usually be built using the platforms supplied libraries. But if there are any incompatiiblities, the submodules can be cloned, and will be found and used instead. Submodules are more a workaround than a feature.

Submodules are otherwise just an inconvience which requires a seperate 'git submodule update". The .gitmodules file in chibi-snow references it via ssh, so that a ssh fetch of it is performed. When someone has cloned the library using git: or https: protocols this causes an inconsistancy which just makes the chance of failure greater. Even if github allows it for general connections it may not be usable from everywhere chibi-scheme may be cloned.

Right now the chibi-scheme install script fails if snow isn't present. It seems that chibi should otherwise be installable without snow.

Snow could be detatched from chibi-scheme and have its own Makefile that installs it on top of an exisiting chibi-scheme distribution. If could then have its subdirectories layed out in a way which makes it possible to develop separately, such as including other scheme implementations.

Otherwise I think it would be better just left as part of the chibi-scheme repo.