GIT submodules overkill

Git has this faboulous feature of (sub-)modularization of the repositories. Over the course of over two years of development SAW grew up in terms of sub-modules. Sub-modularization has is beneficial mainly because it gives an ease of pulling updates without violating source code of the system under implementation.

The practice of managing sub-modules that I found particularly successful is to always fork official github repositories and refer to them as sub-modules.

This technique allows clear separation from the official repository and sometimes necessary customization.

The gotcha of the sub-modularization is that often libraries come in the half-backed condition that requires some degree of building them (with make, grunt, or ant). For my purposes I invested in one, central "deploy" bash script that:

• performs pull from central repository,  
• performs submodule initialization and updating
• builds libraries (in particular jquery and jquery-ui) 
• compiles JavaScript assets (with jammit) 
• instructs RoR application server (passenger) to reload application sources

Full source of the script can be found here. The screen-shoot was made out of fabulous OSX git (and not only GIT) gui named SourceTree.