We have a project written in C that depends on several libraries as git submodules. We built an Azure Pipeline to build it, using multiple containers targeting multiple environments.
The challenge is that the build takes more time than we'd like, partly because of the fact that the submodules are being recompiled every time, even though they do not change.
What I'm looking for is a way to build the submodules only when needed, store them as artifacts, and have the main build consume them.
As far as I understand, I can set up a build for the submodule's repos which will poll for changes, but I want my product to depend on specific commits of the submodules - i.e. I'm not always taking the latest submodule version.
So I'm looking to trigger a submodule build whenever we switch to a new commit. Can this be achieved in Azure Pipelines? What would be the best way to manage the artifacts (e.g. store the commit ID as part of the artifact name)?
