A Proposal to Move to Git

[Doug Evans]

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> wrote:
>>>>>> "H.J. Lu" <hjl.tools@gmail.com>:
>
>> I assume git repo has both binutils and gdb. Is that possible to only
>> checkout binutils portion?
>
> Not as such.  There is something similar called sparse checkouts.
> Eg. if your source is organized like
>  binutils/
>  gdb/
> you can opt to checkout only
>  binutils/
> in your working directory.
>
> But it still will be organized as a binutils/ subdirectory at the top
> level.
>
> Ie. if you clone your binutils-only version of gdb+binutils like so
>  git clone git://somegitrepo.org/gdbbinutils.git binutils
> you will have to do
>  cd binutils/binutils
> to get to he interesting stuff...
>
> Also the "user interface" for sparse checkouts kinda sucks:
>  - You set a git property
>  - You add lines to a text file saying what should be checked out
>  - You either do an initial checkout, or you use the little used command
>    git-read-tree to update the working directory
>
> After this, git can be used normally (merge, add, commit, push).
>
> If disk usage is an issue, I guess it could be useful...?  You would
> still have the entire git repo, though.
>

Not that this is necessarily one of HJ's issues, but it's too bad
"binutils" is both the name of the package and a directory within it.
Otherwise I can imagine all-binutils, install-binutils, check-binutils
in the top level makefile doing the right thing (e.g. being wrappers
for all-gas+all-ld+..., etc.).