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Debian Git Monorepo

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Re: Debian Git Monorepo

#61

Post by tazjin »

alkonaut wrote: post #58

I didn't lift an eyebrow at the headline which is apparently an april fools joke. But what is it that makes it so absurd that it works as a joke, which I'm missing? The size seems absurd (500GB) but why would the Debian source be 500GB? To me it's in no way obvious that "Debian" would include any third party packages repackaged by the distro maintainers. Are Debian people maintaining N source repositories for third p…

This includes the sources of all the Debian packages.

In general this is a good idea, and it is close to how nixpkgs works (which is, in some sense, a "distributed monorepo"), but git, the Debian tooling and so on wouldn't actually be able to support a good workflow here.

Re: Debian Git Monorepo

#62

Post by tazjin »

nolist_policy wrote: post #3

April fool aside, what I really want is a Debian git monorepo of submodules, where each submodule points to the upstream git repository.

Why use submodules when you can properly vendor the upstream git, and export/import commits without breaking hashes on either side?

https://github.com/josh-project/josh

We've been using josh at TVL for years and it's just amazing.

Re: Debian Git Monorepo

#63

Post by viraptor »

paulgdp wrote: post #9
G3rn0ti wrote: post #7

I know it‘s an April‘s fool. But I don’t get this recent trend of people arguing in favor of a monorepo (at my work place, too). It’s a nightmare to handle and use. What gives?

NixOS uses a monorepo and I think everyone loves it. I love being able to easily grep through all the packages source code, and there's regularly PRs that harmonizes conventions across many packages. Nixpkgs doesn't include the packaged software source code, so it's a lot more practical than what Debian is doing. Creating a whole distribution often requires changes synchronized across many packages, so it really make…

Is nixpkgs really a monorepo as usually discussed? It's got packages, os modules, and some supporting scripts. Nix itself lives in a different place, so does the RFC planning, system artwork and a few other things. I would expect it all together to become a monorepo.

> even though they have far fewer maintainers than Debian.

Debian has ~1.5k contributors, nixpkgs lists >3.5k maintainers. (Although that list is not pruned over time)

Re: Debian Git Monorepo

#64

Post by benrutter »

alkonaut wrote: post #58

I didn't lift an eyebrow at the headline which is apparently an april fools joke. But what is it that makes it so absurd that it works as a joke, which I'm missing? The size seems absurd (500GB) but why would the Debian source be 500GB? To me it's in no way obvious that "Debian" would include any third party packages repackaged by the distro maintainers. Are Debian people maintaining N source repositories for third p…

I think its less maintenance and more for pinning versions of software to ensure stability. I guess that comes with maintaining a package manager like apt.

Definitely with you on not realizing it was a joke at first. Don't google have a company wide mono repo, that I'd guess includes all search and chrome? Or is that just an urban legend?

Re: Debian Git Monorepo

#65

Post by samus »

benrutter wrote: post #64
alkonaut wrote: post #58

I didn't lift an eyebrow at the headline which is apparently an april fools joke. But what is it that makes it so absurd that it works as a joke, which I'm missing? The size seems absurd (500GB) but why would the Debian source be 500GB? To me it's in no way obvious that "Debian" would include any third party packages repackaged by the distro maintainers. Are Debian people maintaining N source repositories for third p…

I think its less maintenance and more for pinning versions of software to ensure stability. I guess that comes with maintaining a package manager like apt. Definitely with you on not realizing it was a joke at first. Don't google have a company wide mono repo, that I'd guess includes all search and chrome? Or is that just an urban legend?

The stuff in Google's monorepo is mostly their own code, not snapshots from upstream.

Re: Debian Git Monorepo

#66

Post by WanderPanda »

benrutter wrote: post #64
alkonaut wrote: post #58

I didn't lift an eyebrow at the headline which is apparently an april fools joke. But what is it that makes it so absurd that it works as a joke, which I'm missing? The size seems absurd (500GB) but why would the Debian source be 500GB? To me it's in no way obvious that "Debian" would include any third party packages repackaged by the distro maintainers. Are Debian people maintaining N source repositories for third p…

I think its less maintenance and more for pinning versions of software to ensure stability. I guess that comes with maintaining a package manager like apt. Definitely with you on not realizing it was a joke at first. Don't google have a company wide mono repo, that I'd guess includes all search and chrome? Or is that just an urban legend?

Isn‘t git submodules a much more lean way at accomplishing this than a clunky 500gb repo?

Re: Debian Git Monorepo

#67

Post by jillesvangurp »

G3rn0ti wrote: post #7

I know it‘s an April‘s fool. But I don’t get this recent trend of people arguing in favor of a monorepo (at my work place, too). It’s a nightmare to handle and use. What gives?

Having lots of small repos also generates overhead they need to be checked out separately, tagged individually, built individually, etc.

The reason that this is a bad April first joke is that the idea actually has merit. Google runs their company like this. The unthinkable bit is not doing this technically but Debian rearchitecting the way it works. Doing this with Git is a separate topic. It's probably not great for this. But mono repos at this scale are not impossible.

Re: Debian Git Monorepo

#68

Post by redleader55 »

codesnik wrote: post #49
dijit wrote: post #2

I was always surprised that Perforce didn't have anything for open source, Git is basically eating their lunch because monorepo's suck so much with git; so people do things in a more fragmented and git-friendly way. Not that I really want to see a proprietary product succeed, but it's somewhat surprising that: A) We don't have anything better B) Perforce isn't trying to gain adoption by giving its software for free t…

from what I've heard, git become much friendlier with monorepos in recent years because of microsoft involvement. Windows repo, pretty sizeable, is now using git, and it supposedly works even without strange things like vfs for git.

It's not only Windows that uses Git at Microsoft, but Sharepoint and Office (which includes the on-prem version of SharePoint). In terms of repo size Windows and Office are similar. I was part of the team that migrated Sharepoint from a Perforce clone to Git and helped build the tooling to allow Office to move as well. VFS for Git [1] and Scalar [2] are really good pieces of software.

[1] - https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit

[2] - https://github.com/microsoft/scalar

Re: Debian Git Monorepo

#69

Post by bluGill »

samus wrote: post #65
benrutter wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its less maintenance and more for pinning versions of software to ensure stability. I guess that comes with maintaining a package manager like apt. Definitely with you on not realizing it was a joke at first. Don't google have a company wide mono repo, that I'd guess includes all search and chrome? Or is that just an urban legend?

The stuff in Google's monorepo is mostly their own code, not snapshots from upstream.

Chrome has brought in third party code. Which makes Debian mad and they do a lot of work to strip that out to use the upstream libraries. (Or at least that is how I understand it - I don't follow Debian closely)

Re: Debian Git Monorepo

#70

Post by samus »

bluGill wrote: post #69
samus wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stuff in Google's monorepo is mostly their own code, not snapshots from upstream.

Chrome has brought in third party code. Which makes Debian mad and they do a lot of work to strip that out to use the upstream libraries. (Or at least that is how I understand it - I don't follow Debian closely)

Yeah, that's why I wrote "mostly" :)
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