This is such a common scenario that there must be a sensible solution, yet despite pages of reading and copious Git gymnastics, my brain aches and I'm unable to make this work...

I'm working with Wordpress, though this will fit most website dev scenario's. I want to manage the site install with a git repo and also manage various WP plugins, jQuery plugins and other code bits in separate repos which can easily be pulled/pushed from their external sources. Seems simple enough until you look at the details...

The criteria

"Subfolders" criterion The folder for each plugin should not be bound to the root folder of its source repo. Many repos have multiple nested folders such as "my-repo-name/...", "dev/", "test/", "src/" where the contents of the later is the thing required. This is important to keep the referencing URLs clean and to minimise publicly available rubbish.

"No Proxys" criterion The ideal solution would not require additional intermediary branches or repos. Pushing changes to a plugin's external source should be simple and not require multiple intermediary merges/pushes.

"Real Files" criterion Ideally the outer repo for the whole website should actually contain the files of the plugins' subrepos (ie no "submodules"). I could be persuaded away from this one though...

"Publishing" criterion It must play well with rsync and/or git push'ing to the live server

I've looked at these five solutions

Git Submodules Simple enough for making changes and pushing/pulling but submodules fail on the "Subfolders" and "Real File" criteria

Git read-tree/subtree merge Solves the "Real Files" problem and read-tree actually lets you reference a branch's subfolder but when I did so and tried to merge changes on master back upstream, Git failed to remember that it came from a