Design decisions

While developing subpatch, I took the following design decisions. The requirement list still gives a lot of freedom for the implementation. Therefore this page documents and explains the chosen decisions here.

DD1: written in python3 (but open for a port to another language later if successful)

• [+] faster iteration speed
• [+] Easier deployment/install for users of subpatch. python runs everywhere.
• [+] Programming language that I know really good and written a lot of code already.

DD2: config file format is git-config

• [+] the same config format that the main scm tool for subpatch (=git) uses.
• [+] Most developers are already familiar with the config format, e.g. because they are modyfing ~/.git config.

DD3: The config is a single file and placed at the root of the repository

• [+] The project's root directory can be found even without scm. E.g. after the source code was exported with git archive.
• [+] A single file avoids a search in all sub directories. Can be expensive for big projects.

DD4: Published as a standalone and single python script

TODO add [+] points here

DD5: Filenames and file system paths are python bytes objects, not strings

TODO add [+] points here

DD6: The subproject's history is not include in the superproject's history.

TODO E.g. git-subtree and combo-layers are doing this

TODO Including the history is against learing L4 (minimize accidentally complexity)

TODO add [+],[-] points here

Note: This list is not completed yet and should grow while supbatch is developed.