Managing 3rd party sources and binaries used by code under source control

Question

I have a large code base under source control (was subversion, now git). To compile the code and run the tests I use a set of 3rd party libraries. These libraries can be div

Answer 1

A fair solution for my problem is git-subtree which was recently merged into mainline git. It provides a fair balance between my requirements and the platform limitations. Now I have multiple repositories for the externals (each has a vendor branch as well as local changes branch) and each project repository takes parts of these externals into sub-folders. To keep things organized I maintain a 'bin' and 'lib' folders which contains soft links to the appropriate files/folders in the externals sub-folder.

git-subtree allows to merge a sub-tree from an external repository into a sub-folder. The sub-folder can be merged back and forth with the external repository.

Pros/Cons:

1. Small repository - The repository is not as small as I would like it to be but it contains only the necessary parts from the external repositories. To save space I try to keep the external trees small. I consider it a good price to pay when in return I get simplicity and robustness; as loading and updating a project is a simple git pull and all project related data is contained in a single repository

2. Project/Externals sync - As the project and externals are versioned in the same repository, I can checkout any branch/tag I want and expect it to be working.

3. Simplicity - Day-by-day work is straight forward. Updating external repository, creating a new one or switching to a different version of the external may be tricky and requires special syntax. However this does happen too much. The best thing is that one can add a new external to this project first and only afterwards split it (using git-subtree) into its own repository.

4. Cross platform - Well it's git

5. Binaries - I decided to avoid holding binaries and provide Makefiles instead. I came to this decision as some of my externals depend on other externals which makes it very hard to build a binary that doesn't change very often. For some externals I do store the binaries due to very long build times.

Structure:

/root
   /External
      /External1 (git-subtree from git@git.domain.com:External1 v1.0)
      /External2 (git-subtree from git@git.domain.com:External2 v0.7)
   /lib
      /libExternal1.a -> ../External/External1/libExternal1.a
      /libExternal2.a -> ../External/External1/libExternal2.a
   /include
      /External1 -> ../External/External1/include
      /External2 -> ../External/External2/include