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Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

One thing I don't usually see discussed in monorepo vs multi repo discussions is there's an inverse Conway's law that happens: choosing one or the other will affect the structure of your organization and the way it solves problems. Monorepos tend to invite individual heroics among common infrastructure teams, for example. Because there are so many changes going in at once, anything touching a common area has a huge number of potential breakages, so effort to deliver even a single "feature" skyrockets. Doing the same thing in a multi-repo may require coordinating several PRs over a couple of weeks and some internal politics, but that might also be split among different developers who aren't even on a dedicated build team.

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> Because there are so many changes going in at once, anything touching a common area has a huge number of potential breakages, so effort to deliver even a single "feature" skyrockets.

If a specific change in a monorepo is so centrally embedded it requires incredible effort to do atomically (the benefit of having the monorepo in the first place), you are still able to split it into multiple gradual changes (and "require coordinating several PRs over a couple of weeks and some internal politics, but that might also be split among different developers who aren't even on a dedicated build team.").

So in a monorepo you can still enjoy the same advantage you describe for multi repo, and you'll even have much better visibility into the rollout of your gradual change thanks to the monorepo.

That's an optimistic take on what happens in the polyrepo setup. A common alternative (I suspect by far the more common one) is that changes are made to the common area but not propagated to downstream repos, which all end up pinned to different versions of the common repo and struggle to update once they get ~years out of date.

Yeah. My experience is that the teams managing shared repos tend to shift responsibility for integrating their changes onto their users. They then also more often make breaking changes because they’re insulated from the costs of those changes.

the obvious result of that is: the changes are often not integrated for ages, if ever. Which means at some point it becomes a problem and the cost to do the integration has become much higher.

We have a person deditated to bringing in changes to our polyrepo. Nothing is considered done until it is in his mainline branches so there is incentive to get things integrated. Nothing goes in until it passes the full test suite, whith he verifies you ran before integrating and then runs again to be sure.

as someone who works on core parts that are lively to break everything I spend half of my time just integrating things and anouther quarter trying to figure out how to make my things either less core or not need changes so often.

I'd caution that a monorepo isn't a full fix to that. People often make multiple versions of libraries. You have separate 2.X and 3.X versions, with independent source code (or branches), and ask people to migrate to the new one.

There's not really a way around that when you need some behavioral change for the code using the library.

Is your underlying assumption that the organization doesn't want to go one way or the other in the first place and is nudged by the technical choice afterwards ?

I think most of the time the philosophical decision (more shared parts or better separation) is made before deciding how you'll deal with the repos.

Now, if an org changes direction mid-way, the handling of the code can still be adapted without fundamentally switching the repo structure. Many orgs are multi-repo but their engineers have access to almost all of the code, and monorepo teams can still have strong isolation of what they're doing, up to having different CI rules and deployment management.

I think GP's claiming it's a feedback loop, not one-directional relationship. Communication structure of an organization ends up reflected in the structure of systems it designs, and at the same time, the structure of a system influences the communication structure of the organization building it.

This makes sense if you consider that:

1) Changes to system structure, especially changes to fundamentals when the system is already being built, are difficult, expensive and time consuming. This gives system designs inertia that grows over time.

2) Growing the teams working on a system means creating new organizational units; the more inertia system has, the more sense it makes for growth to happen along the lines suggested by system architecture, rather than forcing the system to change to accommodate some team organization ideals.

Monorepo/multirepo is a choice that's very difficult to change once work on building the system starts, and it's a choice you commit at the very beginning (and way before the choice starts to matter) - a perfect recipe for not a mere nudge, but a scaffolding the organization itself will grow around, without even realizing it.

Having done this a few times, I suspect the norm is that the decision is taken without a full understanding of the tradeoffs, both because the decision is taken before engineering has matured and can be hard to change later, and because the disadvantages are easy to downplay - "Sure, but our team will always stay on top of dependencies."

Typically someone has read a few blog posts like the ones linked to, and have some vague ideas of the positives but don't have a full understanding of how how the disadvantages will shape their workflow.

I've seen people with experience at hobby or small scale successfully campaigning for a switch at work and then hitting a wall - in both directions. Updating every call site for a breaking change doesn't sound that onerous, and at a small scale it isn't. Having each team update versioned depencies doesn't sound that hard, and at a small scale it isn't.

Just like with languages, don't listen to anyone who tells you this will solve all your problems. One of the options are merely the least bad for your situation.

required reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Much more common is that an easy cross project change in a monorepo simply isn't don't in a polyrepo because of how much more onerous it is.

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