On the (very early) tapas platform at theteam I got a little stuck when mixing nDistro and git submodules and wanted to explain what I'd done to get around those issues. On the tapas-models module, MongoDB is used for data storage and tapas-models uses Mongoose for MongoDB integration, but nDistro doesn't download Mongoose's downstream dependencies
This is because nDistro downloads the tarball of the project from Github and that tarball doesn't include dependencies. It might be nice for Github to do this, and I'll search the Github Support site to see if I can find something about that. Anyhoo, the tarball doesn't contain it's git bindings, so I can't go in there and update the git submodules.
The unfortunate thing is I've had to expose myself to some of the Mongoose inner workings to get the dependencies, but once I know them, it's a light touch for the next part. Using nDistro as normal, I include that dependency, including the revision number in my .ndistro file. As nDistro is executed in a bash environment, shell scripting can be used alongside the module declarations. So, I use a Linux move command to put the dependency where Mongoose expects it and everyone's happy.
It's a simple solution to what was a nagging issue and keeps me on my happy path toward NNNN
