[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [Autoware] Splitting the Autoware.AI repository and changing the organisation

[Geoffrey Biggs via Discourse.ros.org]

[quote="Ian_Colwell, post:24, topic:8139"]

I dont know anything about vcs (first time hearing about it here), but why are we choosing vcs over git submodules?

[/quote]



We could do it with submodules, but there are three disadvantages of this.



- It only works for Git repositories. One of our long-term goals is to support Autoware as a distribution, not a single project. This is to work with external algorithm nodes, for example. This means supporting packages from repositories that come from outside the project, and those outside packages could potentially use a non-git RCS, which would make using them as submodules impossible.

- It is easier to provide different versions of Autoware's collection of repositories using `vcs` than submodules, because `vcs` works on a text-based input file. We can distribute various different configuration files for different versions of Autoware based on different needs. Doing this with submodules is really hard.

- Submodules and branches do not play nicely together.



`vcs` also tends to work well with the existing ROS package management approach.



I think that submodules are best for the situation where you want to treat an external project as part of your project and work the two pieces of code in lock-step, as if they are one. That is not what we are trying to do here.











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