The Utilities/cmliblzma directory contains a reduced distribution of the liblzma source tree with only the library source code and CMake build system. It is not a submodule; the actual content is part of our source tree and changes can be made and committed directly. We update from upstream using Git's "subtree" merge strategy. A special branch contains commits of upstream liblzma snapshots and nothing else. No Git ref points explicitly to the head of this branch, but it is merged into our history. Update liblzma from upstream as follows. Create a local branch to explicitly reference the upstream snapshot branch head: git branch liblzma-upstream c289e634 Use a temporary directory to checkout the branch: mkdir liblzma-tmp cd liblzma-tmp git init git pull .. liblzma-upstream rm -rf * Now place the (reduced) liblzma content in this directory. See instructions shown by git log c289e634 for help extracting the content from the upstream svn repo. Then run the following commands to commit the new version. Substitute the appropriate date and version number: git add --all GIT_AUTHOR_NAME='liblzma upstream' \ GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL='xz-devel@tukaani.org' \ GIT_AUTHOR_DATE='Sun Jun 30 19:55:49 2013 +0300' \ git commit -m 'liblzma 5.0.5-gb69900ed (reduced)' && git commit --amend Edit the commit message to describe the procedure used to obtain the content. Then push the changes back up to the main local repository: git push .. HEAD:liblzma-upstream cd .. rm -rf liblzma-tmp Create a topic in the main repository on which to perform the update: git checkout -b update-liblzma master Merge the liblzma-upstream branch as a subtree: git merge -s recursive -X subtree=Utilities/cmliblzma \ liblzma-upstream If there are conflicts, resolve them and commit. Build and test the tree. Commit any additional changes needed to succeed. Finally, run git rev-parse --short=8 liblzma-upstream to get the commit from which the liblzma-upstream branch must be started on the next update. Edit the "git branch liblzma-upstream" line above to record it, and commit this file.