pros and cons of each way of including external directories

[amogus07]

Currently, I have a bunch of zsh plugins as submodules in my source directory. But there are many many other ways of including git repositories. Which ones are you using and for which purposes?

[twpayne]

I use a combination of externals, chezmoi and zsh config, and ignores:

Externals:

https://github.com/twpayne/dotfiles/blob/4c0b9a5ff7ca1afabe44261a0fa3736c41bb5ff3/home/.chezmoiexternal.toml.tmpl#L116-L145

chezmoi config (in ~/.config/chezmoi/chezmoi.toml):

https://github.com/twpayne/dotfiles/blob/4c0b9a5ff7ca1afabe44261a0fa3736c41bb5ff3/home/.chezmoi.toml.tmpl#L56-L60

zsh config:

https://github.com/twpayne/dotfiles/blob/4c0b9a5ff7ca1afabe44261a0fa3736c41bb5ff3/home/dot_zshrc.tmpl#L51-L55

Ignores (to ignore all the zsh plugins I don't want, so they don't even get added to ~/.oh-my-zsh):

https://github.com/twpayne/dotfiles/blob/4c0b9a5ff7ca1afabe44261a0fa3736c41bb5ff3/home/.chezmoiignore.tmpl#L1-L9