Never use git submodules

I’m writing this as a reminder to my future self never to use git submodules. For most things I would say never say never but let’s make an exception for this one.

I’ve used submodules for the following reasons:

• There is some logical separation or a clear defined interfaces between two things, and repos are cheap
• There is a 1 to many (usually 2 or 3) relationship between this thing (that has stable interface) and something else

The problem is that this 1-to-many thing usually starts as 1-to-2 and usually doesn’t go much further than that. It’s always this could eventually increase in scale but usually those hunches are wrong.

So where does it fall down? It seems like it rarely works well:

• Cognitive overhead for multiple git commands to keep things updated
• Doing normal things with git (conflict resolution, reviews, etc) feels super clumsy
• With reviews, it often means reviewing multiple times and messes up approval workflows
• It’s 2020 and this process still looks unnecessarily complex https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1260748/how-do-i-remove-a-submodule

My alternative for now for better gitops workflows is mono-repo everything, this seems to work better with CI anyway