Submodules for language bindings (was: Github?)

[Suvayu Ali]

On Thu, May 08, 2014 at 03:29:31PM -0700, W. Trevor King wrote:
> On Fri, May 09, 2014 at 12:00:46AM +0200, Suvayu Ali wrote:
> > One of my TODOs is to also package the ruby bindings, and
> > notmuch-vim.  The only thing preventing me now is my unfamiliarty
> > with ruby, and Fedora packaging guidelines for ruby-gems.
> 
> I think this is one argument argument in favor of submodules, because
> they make it easy to treat the bindings as separate packages.  Once
> you have separate packages, it's easy to delegate packaging (e.g. “I
> don't use the Ruby bindings, so I'm not going to maintain the
> Ruby-binding package.  I'll leave that to Alice, who likes Ruby, but
> is less familiar with $distro's Python packaging”).

Well as far as my understanding of rpm goes, sub-packages are prefered
here rather than independent packages.  I believe the reason is again
easier dependency tracking[1]; all sub-packages share the same source
rpm, so no explicit `Requires' in the spec file.

Cheers,

Footnotes:

[1] yum and it's ilk don't do that by magic, the packager needs to add
    instructions in the spec file for that to work correctly.  With
    sub-packages, this becomes redundant.

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.