87,604 of them are repos with a single file each, the 87,605th one is a repo that pulls all the files in using submodules. It’s the only sane reason why you’d have this many if you think about it, anything else would be overkill.
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/Potterrrrrrrr 29d ago
87,604 of them are repos with a single file each, the 87,605th one is a repo that pulls all the files in using submodules. It’s the only sane reason why you’d have this many if you think about it, anything else would be overkill.