Tracking 3rd party code with Git

Question

I can\'t seem to grok the different solutions I\'ve found and studied for tracking external code. Let alone understand how to apply them to my use case...

Would you

Answer 1

I use git submodules to track reusable apps in my Django projects, but it is kind of messy in the long run.

It is messy for deployment because you can't get a clean archive of the whole tree (with submodules) using git archive. There are some tricks, but nothing perfect. Besides, the submodule update mecanism is not that good for working with submodules branches.

You might have to take a look at virtualenv and pip, because they had some recent improvements in order to work with external repositories.

pip : http://pip.openplans.org/ and working with pip/virtualenv : http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/dec/15/pip/