How to handle submodules that are not packaged

[David James]

Dear Mentors,

I have been looking for information on how to handle the submodule of a project that is not or cannot be packaged for Debian. Say a project I want to package has the submodule registered at externals/foo/bar. For whatever reason Bar doesn't exist in the repositories. How do I handle this as a packager?

To give an actual example of what I mean, the upstream yuzu repository (https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu) has a submodule at externals/sirit. The yuzu package moves this into the top directory with a rule in debian/rules that creates a symbolic link in externals/.

As yuzu is the only real example I can find of this situation, I was wondering if there are any other ways to handle this. More importantly, if there are other ways how would they be handled on the Salsa side i.e. a package repository with upstream/ and debian/ branches?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

David James