During the last couple of days, we've transitioned all the third party
libraries used by wxWidgets, such as libpng, libjpeg and so on, to use
Git submodules
instead of just subdirectories in the main repository. If you don't use Git to
get the latest and greatestfor the appropriate definition of
"great" wxWidgets, you don't need need to read further as it shouldn't
affect you in any way except for resulting in faster and more frequent updates
to these libraries (but still consider starting to use sources from Git to
help us with testing!).
If you do use Git, you will notice that your next update, i.e. git
pull or git fetch && git merge --ff-only origin/master,
will delete all files in src/{expat, jpeg, png, tiff, zlib}
directories. Do not be alarmed by this but do
run
git submodule update --init
to initialize and get the latest contents of all
the submodules. This will, unfortunately, take quite some time, and if you use
a not too ancient version of Git (2.8 or later), you should be able to speed
the process up significantly by
doing
git fetch --recurse-submodules -j2
instead, where "2" could be replaced by
any number up to 5 (higher would be useless with only 5 submodules).
During subsequent updates, if you notice any change to one of the submodules,
you need to only rerun git submodule update (without the
--init option) and it will be much faster. Other than that, your use
of wxWidgets Git repository shouldn't have to change in any way, the only
difference is now most of Git commands won't recurse into submodules, at least
by default, so git grep, for example, won't find any matches in the
subdirectories mentioned above by default. However mostly the new behaviour is
more useful, and you can use the same --recurse-submodules option
with a few Git commands to change it if really needed.
Of course, if you do find any problems due to the switch to submodules or
third party libraries upgrades that have taken place together with it (we now
use the latest versions of all of them, notably jumping from libjpeg 6b
released in 1998 to 9b, released in 2016), please let us know on the mailing
lists, as usual.
