Multiple distfiles vs "git submodule"

[Jason Liu]

I have a question regarding how best to fetch the source code for my
Blender port. Blender's source code is split up into four pieces, which are
of course structured as submodules in GitHub. I know that I could use the
'git submodule update --init' technique to obtain the submodules during the
fetch phase, as has been discussed previously:

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/50708

However, Blender does something which many other projects on GitHub don't:
the four parts of the source code are always tagged with an identical
release version number, and are always pushed up to GitHub simultaneously
when a new release gets tagged. This makes it relatively easy to have my
portfile fetch the four tarballs as distfiles. And since MacPorts supports
multiple distfiles, this also seems like a viable option.

The reason why I ask is that if I fetch the tarballs of the four parts, the
amount of data downloaded totals around 53 MB. If I use 'git submodule',
the amount of data downloaded totals around 959 MB. Yes, disk storage and
network bandwidth are cheap these days, but that's still a pretty big
difference.

So... which method should I use?

-- 
Jason Liu
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