Prevent submodules from automatically loading.

[Kyle Smith]

We have several projects with large build dependancies that are included with them. The problem being that we only want to download and install these dependancies the first time you'd need them. We're currently storing these dependancies inside the repository itself (not my favorite but that's what the team went with) so a project that should only be about 100MB to clone is now 800MB to clone. We're looking at possibly breaking these dependancies into submodules but since SourceTree automatically loads them we're no better off. Is it possible to prevent SourceTree from automatically loading the submodules assigned to a git repository?

[EddieW · Accepted solution]

I think you hit the nail on the head Kyle. Binary dependencies should not be in source, and versioned.

Consider tools like Gradle, Maven or language specific dependency management solutions (npm, rvm, etc)

Ignoring the pain for developers, your release and deploy processes are all constrained by the same burden. I would think its not condusive to continuous integration either...

And frankly git's journaling system doesn't handle binaries well, and is very expensive to process. (which isnt a problem for most teams today!)

[Kyle Smith]

That's what I had expected. I think I'm going to start persuing solutions that will work better with continuous integration.