[Ovirt-devel] How to handle 3rd party code?

[Jason Guiditta]

I have been meaning to send an email to the list about this for weeks.
I am looking to assemble a consensus on how to handle version control
for some 3rd party code we are using in the server suite.  These are,
for the moment at least, rails plugins (not necessarily available as
gems or rpms) and javascript libraries/plugins.  There are a couple of
issues we need to solve here:
1) Keeping up to date on these bits of code, which may or may not be
available in git (a lot of the javascript is hosted in svn, some no
version control at all)
2) We may have our own patches that we need to carry, though of course
we will try to push them upstream.
3) Many of these items do no follow our practices- specifically
whitespace and ^Ms.  This makes it difficult to drop in the updated code
and compare it to our (cleaned-up) version in git, especially if we have
made any changes/customizations.

The only idea I have heard/read about that seems to be a possible good
solution is sub-modules, but there seems to be a fair amount of
maintenance involved in keeping them in synch with our main repo
whenever we do an update or patch to one of the modules.  From what I
have seen, you have to have a reference in the main repo pointing to the
sub-module, including correct version.  This would mean every update to
the sub-module would also require an update to the server repo, which is
easy enough, but feels like something that would easily be missed. Maybe
this is easier than I think, perhaps someone else can clear that up for
me.  Also, if there are issues I did not outline above, please speak up
so we can consider those as well.

-j