title: Git alternative to sending out tarballs and asking patches be sent back for a sub-project?
body: <p>I have a largeish project which has within it a sub-directory which itself is a project.</p>
  
  <p>I want to manage this sub-directory within the larger project sharing the same branches, tags, etc, for simplicity sake. The integrity of the larger project and ability to track it as a monolithic git repo is very important to me.</p>
  
  <p>But I also want to publish and accept pull requests from contributors in the smaller project (sub-directory), without exposing them to my larger project. The sub-project requires some ancillary files (like an Eclipse .project) in its parent in order to be fully self-contained.</p>
  
  <p>I've looked into submodule, subtree merge, and sparse-checkout, but couldn't figure out how to do this. As a stop-gap measure I just ship out a tarball of the sub-directory and ask for patches in return. </p>
  
  <p>Any ideas how to improve this with a git-centric workflow?</p>