I feel that using Git submodules is somehow troublesome for my development workflow. I've heard about Git subtree and Gitslave.
- Are there more tools out there for multiple repository projects and how do they compare ?
- Can these tools run on Windows ?
Which is best for you depends on your needs, desires, and workflow. They are in some senses semi-isomorphic, it is just some are a lot easier to use than others for specific tasks.
gitslave is useful when you control and develop on the subprojects at more of less the same time as the superproject, and furthermore when you typically want to tag, branch, push, pull, etc all repositories at the same time. gitslave has never been tested on windows that I know of. It requires perl.
git-submodule is better when you do not control the subprojects or more specifically wish to fix the subproject at a specific revision even as the subproject changes. git-submodule is a standard part of git and thus would work on windows.
git-subtree provides a front-end to git's built-in subtree merge strategy. It is better when you prefer to have a single-repository "unified" git history. Unlike the subtree merge strategy, it is easier to export changes to the different (directory) trees back out to the original project, but it is not as automatic as it is with gitslave or even git-submodule.
repo is in theory similar to gitslave, but not as well documented for non-android operations that I have found. It is fairly dedicated to the Google Android development model and only natively supports a handful of git commands (though you can run arbitrary commands) and the limited native support doesn't support, for example, a centralized repository to push to and checking out a branch seems fairly difficult.
kitenet's mr is what you would want to use if you have multiple version control systems in use, but is mostly limited for git-only superprojects due to its lowest common denominator approach. There are ways to run arbitrary commands, but they are not as well integrated.
I currently use submodules for development and not just relating 3rd party libraries. There are some ways that you can make life easier with submodules, especially when they are the source of merge or rebase conflicts. Look to ls-tree to get the 2 commits involved on a conflict in the submodule. This is probably the most difficult part of submodules for people to deal with. For now scripting will make this much easier to work with. Future versions of Git should have better native support for dealing with them.
Hope this helps.
We encountered a similar issue when using Git submodules in projects where we had dependencies in a variety of languages. To deal with them, we built and open-sourced a tool called MDLR ("Modular") that gives you declarative version-controlled Git dependencies with similar functionality to Git submodules, but without the annoying workflow. You can install it and manage your dependencies with the instructions/downloads on the GitHub repo
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6500524/alternatives-to-git-submodules