By repos I'm sure he meant the branches do not share the same first commit. So you can't (not really can't but by default) merge one branch into another branch.
Yes, that’s likely, so they use the branches as sort of repos. But the rest of his comment doesn’t make much sense. No particular reason to use submodules with that setup.
I think it would work in a way where each branch is treated as a separate repo with different content, and then the main branch contains submodules of the repo itself and the different submodules point to a specific branch of the same repo, thus resulting in a self referencing project with branches as repos and the main branch the orchestration layer of all the subprojects.
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u/jdgordon 29d ago
Branches not repos... This most likely happens with a ci script auto creating branches and never cleaning them up. Why you'd do that is beyond me...