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Comment by rudasn | Hacker News Reader

Change it at once everywhere on an existing large codebase? That's going to be one huge PR no one will want to review properly, let alone approve.

Document the old pattern, document the new pattern, discuss, and come up with a piece by piece plan that is easy to ship and easy to revert if you do screw things up.

Unless the old pattern is insecure or burns your servers, that is.

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I don’t think you and the comment you are replying to are in conflict. Documenting and rolling it out piecemeal is the correct way to make a large change.

I think the point is, either actually commit to doing that, or don’t introduce the new pattern.

Yes, it usually can't be done with one massive checkin. First get buy-in that the old pattern will be changed to the new pattern (hopefully you won't have some senior developer who likes it the old way and fights you), then as you say, come up with a plan to get it done.

The down side to this that I've experienced more than once, though, is incomplete conversions: we thought we had agreement that the change should be done, it turns out to be more difficult than planned, it gets partially completed and then management has a new fire for us to fight, resources are taken away, so you still have two or more ways of doing things.

If things are consistent enough, tools like open rewrite can be used. I’ve seen reviews where it is the recipe for generating the code transformation that gets reviewed, not the thousands of spots where the transform was applied.

Naturally unless it's trivial do it in steps, but committing to doing the whole migration as quickly as prudent or rolling it back completely is key.

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