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.
TODO: Update this DD. subpatch has .subproject files now that are seperate
from the subpatch config file.
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
DD7: The naming convention in config and metadata is the git config style.
In the config file .subpatch and metadata files .subproject (that are
git config files) the naming convention is camelCase. See
these example from the git documentation.
- [+] Consistency, since supatch is using the same style as git itself.
Note: This list is not completed yet and should grow while supbatch is developed.