[Ros-release] Releasing from github directories / submodules?

[Armin Hornung]

Hi,

here's a (hopefully) quick question for the git[hub] experts among you. 
Since Sourceforge will be discontinuing a few features soon and upgrade 
to a new platform (which causes a change of the SVN repository URLs), I 
am considering to move octomap development from sf.net to github. This 
will hopefully ease contributions from other developers, and make the 
release process easier for me (both into ROS with bloom and plain source 
packages).

Is it possible to release from a subdirectory of the repo using bloom, 
or is this not recommended in the Git workflow? The background is that 
the octomap repository[1] has a certain structure where it contains the 
main library ("octomap") and the separate visualization application 
"octovis". You can download or check out the complete set of both 
libraries (convenient for a user on a PC who wants to compile all 
together), or separately (convenient for releasing into ROS or building 
on a robot where you want to separate our the dependencies on Qt and 
OpenGL). So far we have tagged and released this in a hybrid matter from 
SVN, the top level (containing octomap and octovis) as source package 
and the libraries separately for the debian packages with bloom. How 
would I best proceed in mapping this to github repositories, keeping in 
mind that both combined source packages and single tagged libraries 
would be nice? Git submodules should work in that case if I understand 
it correctly. Does this mean I have to maintain three repositories in 
then end (octomap, octovis, and octomap-distribution combining them)?

Best,
Armin

[1] https://octomap.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/octomap/trunk/

-- 
Armin Hornung
Humanoid Robots Lab, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Contact: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~hornunga