Should SBZ use submodules

[TheEt1234]

I recognize that i am kind of irrational about this (i can't figure out the reason) and discord might not be the best way to discuss this, it's very easy to get lost in a conversation and not think things through, it can get very useless when there are two people that want the exact opposite thing (i want submodules, zander doesn't)

so:

Reasons to use submodules:

• they retain the information about where a mod was taken from, and exactly what commit of that mod is being used in sbz
  • counterpoint: that could just be in the README, in fact that is in the readme (not the exact commit)
• they make licensing easier (probably?) by making it easier to tell which mods weren't modified by skyblock zero
  • counterpoint: could just have a list of mods that are unmodified, that's already a thing
• its a lot easier to update a mod when it is under a submodule, and it's very trivial to keep all submoduled mods up to date
• Its easy to see in any git gui which mods are unmodified vs reading a list
  • counterpoint: thats a really insignificant QOL feature thats not relevant

Reasons to not use submodules:

• developers might be inexperienced with them
  • counterpoint: learning experience :P
• Submodule developers show up in the "contributors" tab in github
  • counterpoint: that doesn't really matter, if you want to credit people, please check pull requests that have been merged instead, also it would be good to credit people that come up with ideas or report bugs, etc.
• Its not possible to optimize images of submodules or remove unnecessary files (need to check if .gitattributes works even on submodules)
  • counterpoint: a few megabytes doesn't matter that much (It would be good to see how much would we actually benefit)

---

My own feelings

basically, i have feelings about this for some reason that i can't figure out? i will try to maybe

My irrational reasons, maybe, this is just guessing from where my feelings come from:

• they retain information (the exact commit), and un-submoduling things would be removing that information (just the exact commit, rest is in README), but that information could be added to the README (just less convenient) so idk
• maybe(?) because i was the one that put unmodified mods as submodules to sbz and don't want it to see undone? i like to think this is not why i care
• re-submoduling things again, if that was for whatever reason needed, would be kinda painful
• updating things would be more painful, i want sbz to have up to date mods that aren't modified ideally
• i still haven't figured those reasons out, idk, probably need a psychologist for that xD, maybe i have autism idk
• maybe the feelings are from: "because submodules might be really important for something, and i'm not experienced enough/forgot what it was", maybe that was because i felt like zander was going to un-submodule things and that felt scary for that reason (+ it being hard to undo)

Also, i view the situation kinda as:

• Zander wants to keep the game under 30MB "for no good reason" (in my view)
• I want to have submodules, and i really care about it "for no good reason" (in my view)

Feel free to reply to this i guess, i don't know how zander wants me to treat the issue tracker

I think it might be better if another developer gave their opinion, and not me, this might very well just not matter at all

[corpserot]

Sbz already uses submodules for libraries and mods that can be used as-is without forking. I think that's a pretty good use of submodules. So uh i'm a bit confused at what this is about.

To clarify, despite my complaints about git submodules, i like it a lot more than monorepo'ing all dependencies.

[gamefreq0]

I believe another point against submodules is that if a given repo goes down, it induces headaches for the devs. That said, I think the tradeoff is worthwhile, for the benefits it confers, but it is worth being aware of the tradeoff being made

[corpserot]

If the original repo goes down because of github, even sbz is affected so that's not rly a problem we can solve by not using submodules

If the original repo goes away cuz it's deleted, one of us has a full git history of it. We can become the new stewards temporarily until it's given to mt-mods or minetest-mods

[TheEt1234]

Sbz already uses submodules for libraries and mods that can be used as-is without forking. I think that's a pretty good use of submodules. So uh i'm a bit confused at what this is about.

To clarify, despite my complaints about git submodules, i like it a lot more than monorepo'ing all dependencies.

zander wants to keep the game under 30mb for some reason, and its not possible to optimize images of submodules

(but maybe that can be done with using your luanti_lsp_definitions properly instead of having them in a submodule twice, im unsure how large that is)

(also i think thats not a good goal)

[corpserot]

my annotations can removed at sbz and stubes bc it's not going to receive updates. you'll free up around 2MB disk space.

zander, can you produce size reduction numbers for optimizing images in submodules? i have a suspicion that it's gonna be a small reduction since the submodules don't have a lot of images in the first place.

[The4codeblocks]

so
images can be optimized upstream
and modified-for-sbz versions can just be forks