Proposal: Move to atpm instead of using submodules

[dunkelstern]

Missing Sub-modules would trigger a warning to run atpm fetch to get them and we would not have the git submodule init && git submodule update dance for all recursive dependencies. It would make clear that atpkg needs atfoundation and atbuild needs it too, currently atfoundation gets pulled in implicitly by atpkg which might confuse people.

Additionally we would not have update xyz commits everywhere. Just the lockfile would update (or if we track the master branch instead of a version, we could skip that too, but we would not get a reproducible build that way)

Bootstrapping would be no problem as atpm would only git clone the deps and symlink their external directory. That would be 2 lines in bootstrap/build.sh per dependency (so 4 lines currently)

[drewcrawford]

👍 , send PR

Additionally we would not have update xyz commits everywhere. Just the lockfile would update

I think this would still be the case. At its core, a git submodule is just a lockfile itself, called .gitmodules. So under atpm regime we continue to need update commits in all the cases we need them now I think? But that's not a reason not to do it.

We should be dogfooding our own stuff I think, I have been avoiding that but mostly due to the static linking issue. As that is resolved, that clears the only concern I have about doing this.

[dunkelstern]

Correct, but we only have one lock file that is updating all the time not the one in atbuild and another one in atpkg