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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-09T17:39:21+00:00

I recently joined a new team. This team has been using Subversion for their

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I recently joined a new team. This team has been using Subversion for their source control. They asked me to investigate the possibility of moving the source code to Git.

This seemed like a trivial exercise until I realized they have a large number of svn:externals. The project is a large Java EE project that consists of several web projects. The team uses svn:externals to share some fixed resources (like css, javascript, etc.) amongst the various projects.

My question is twofold:

  • Is there a better strategy for sharing resources within a set of Java projects that we could consider, allowing us to remove the necessity for svn:externals and making the switch to git simpler?
  • If no such better strategy exists, then what are my alternatives?

This is quite a large codebase (lots of revisions and files) so I’d like to take advantage of the performance of git.

Here is the relevant software stack they are using:

  • Subversion
  • Eclipse
  • Maven (2.2.1 IIRC)
  • Windows (for development), AIX (for production)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Sounds like a good case for Git submodules. They should be pretty similar to svn:externals.

    Excerpt from the Git Book:

    It often happens that while working on one project, you need to use another project from within it. Perhaps it’s a library that a third party developed or that you’re developing separately and using in multiple parent projects. A common issue arises in these scenarios: you want to be able to treat the two projects as separate yet still be able to use one from within the other.

    Read more on Git submodules on the Git book: http://book.git-scm.com/5_submodules.html

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