Comment by rsj_hn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsj_hn | Hacker News Reader

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> I'm glad you're having a good experience now, and git as a monorepo will work fine at smaller scales, but you will outgrow it at some point.

I would say the opposite. A lot of companies are fine with independent teams using their own versions of dependencies and their own versions of core code, but at some point that becomes unmanageable and you need to start using a common set of dependencies and the same version of base frameworks to reduce the complexity. That means pushing a patch to a framework means all the teams are upgraded. Monorepos are the most common solution to enforce that behavior.

Look, this is all dealing with the problem of coordination in large teams. Different organizations have different capacities for coordination, and so it's like squeezing a balloon -- yes, you want more agility to pick your own deps but then the cost of that is dealing with so much complexity when you need to push a fix to a commonly used framework or when a CVE is found in a widely used dep and needs to be updated by 1000 different teams all manually.

There is no "right" way. It's just something organizations have to struggle with because it's going to be costly no matter what, and all that matters is what type of cost your org is most easily able to bear. That will decide whether you use a monorepo or a bunch of independent repos, whether you go for microservices or a monolith, and most companies will do some mix of all of the above.

Being on a known-good version of a dependency is tech debt that I want my team to pay down when we have the slack. Alpha testing every commit of everything in prod is not our job. Google3 had company-wide build breaks so often (and hours of retest backlog) that teams had a “build cop” whose job was to urgently complain about them. Eventually they had to pick a set of active heavily-used libraries (e.g., bigtable) and set up the build system so most consumers would not depend on them at the very latest changelist.

> Monorepos are the most common solution to enforce that behavior.

Yes. This is very accurate and also the problem. Monorepos are being used as a political tool to change behavior, but the problem is that it has severe technical implications.

> There is no "right" way.

With git, there is a "wrong" way, and that's not separating your project into different repos. It causes real world technical problems, otherwise we wouldn't have this article posted in the first place.

> It's just something organizations have struggle with because it's going to be costly no matter what, and all that matters is what type of cost your org is most easily able to bear.

It's not a coin toss whether monorepos will have better or worse support from all standard git tooling. It will be worse every time.

The amount of tooling required to enforce dependency upgrades, code styles, security checks, etc across many repos is significantly less than the amount of tooling required to successfully use a monorepo.

If you want to play right and wrong, I will say that noe it’s the right way since there is support for sparse checkouts in git.

This isn’t a useful game to play.

> The amount of tooling required to enforce dependency upgrades, code styles, security checks, etc across many repos is significantly less than the amount of tooling required to successfully use a monorepo.

This is completely false. You only need extra tooling on monorepo for gigantic scale. For 90% or maybe even 99% of companies out there using version control, plain git and a "bunch of folders" is all you need, honest to god. This way you can reap most benefits and very few downsides. Detecting changes in folders is pretty easy, as most CIs/CDs have it built-in. Ff not it's easier to program a script than setup multirepo tooling.

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