create a parent repository that contains each text repo as a git submodule

[JonathanReeve]

Why not create a parent repository that contains each individual text as a git submodule? Unless I'm missing something, it looks a user has to clone this repo, and then run the series of individual clone commands in cloneall.sh, but it seems like it would be cleaner (and maybe better) to have them be submodules. That way, a user could clone this repo and run git submodule update --init --recursive to grab all the individual texts. Additionally, to retrieve the latest copy of all the texts, he/she would just have to run that same command again, and wouldn't have to re-clone new copies of everything when there has been an update to a single text.

[jamescummings]

Hi Jonathan,

A variety of options were considered when creating the textcreationpartnership organization, especially since we were creating so many repositories. We discussed with github the pros and cons of some options, for example the creation of one repository that was huge vs individual repositories for each text. In the end a repository for each text was the chosen solution (and rate limiting to only create so many repositories per second ;-) ) There is nothing stopping us making these all into submodules in the future.

However, and I may be mistaken here, I think you are wrong that people would need to re-clone all the repositories to get updated versions. Surely they just need to do a 'git pull' on each of them? When I'd do this on the commandline I'd just do "for file in */ ; do cd $file; git pull; cd ..; done". We could add a script to help people do this if necessary. Yes, that will be less efficient than updating one repository with a whole heap of submodules.

This is certainly something to consider though. I'd be tempted to leave things as they are for now, unless there is significant demand for such a change.

-James