A while ago I mentioned dev-pipeline, and I kept hacking away and improving the software. I didn’t think about it too much since it met my needs (or was easy to add the missing feature), but it came up at work the other day and I decided to see just how complex the project I was managing was. Since dev-pipeline learned how to generate dependency graphs in dot format, this was easy.

Sub-modules (or if you prefer mercurial, sub-repositories) are a popular method of dealing with complex dependencies spread across multiple repositories. In theory, you can develop libraries while developing multiple applications that use them (or more libraries), and you don’t have to deal with setting up your build environment beyond what it takes to do a simple build.

In practice they lead to lots of issues.