I would like to hear your opinion on using git submodule vs. plugin install.
I now use submodules extensively for everything under /vendor including Rails. It's more complicated to set up than just adding files as normal but makes it easy to update the plugins and view their commit log. A potential problem is that the submodule repositories need to be accessible from all the machines you're working on (including production servers if you use Git for deployment) which is not always convenient. Also, if you switch between long-standing branches a lot it can become a pain when the submodules are out of sync. I personally clone all the repos I'm going to use into a central collection on a server and then add them as submodules to my various Rails projects. This way I can also maintain changes to the plugins independent of my Rails projects.
Hope that helps with your decision.
Andrew
I'm also a big fan of submodules, especially if you're going to be actively developing Engines or plugins.
I use git.rake (http://github.com/mdalessio/git-rake/tree/master) to manage all my submodules. You can perform aggregate actions across all submodules (like change branches, perform diffs, perform commits if necessary). git.rake also rolls submodule commit messages into the superproject log, and can filter 'git status' info for all the submodules to only show what needs add/commit.
Thank you for your opinions. My thoughts are the same.
For some projects I have used plugin install and nowadays git submodules. Personally I do not prefer to have the same code in all my project git repositories for plugins. It is better to treat it like gem dependences and all my local modifications are easy to manage.
Hi all, I'm trying to use git submodules to track edge rails in a project I have. And I set it up according to all examples I found on internet:
cd (RAILS_ROOT) git submodule add git://github.com/rails/rails.git vendor/rails git submodule init git submodule update
Which seemed to work fine at first. But now I can't seem to update rails to the latest edge.
git submodule update
doesn't appear to do anything. And
cd vendor/rails git pull
just hangs there forever. I have also tried
cd vendor/rails git checkout head
And this reports that it is now at the HEAD, but the commit message that it reports to be at is several days old. ?? How can I get it to sync to the bleeding edge version?
Nevermind, solved it.
git pull (from vendor/rails)
does work, it just takes forever. 
