111–120 of 293 posts
I feel terrible for anyone who sees this and thinks, “ah! I should move to a monorepo!” I’ve seen it several times, and the thing they all seem to overlook is that Google has THOUSANDS of hours of effort put into the tooling for their monorepo. Slapping lots of projects into a single git repo without investing in tooling will not be a pleasant experience.
I feel terrible for anyone who sees this and thinks, “ah! I should move to a monorepo!” I’ve seen it several times, and the thing they all seem to overlook is that Google has THOUSANDS of hours of effort put into the tooling for their monorepo. Slapping lots of projects into a single git repo without investing in tooling will not be a pleasant experience.
We moved to a monorepo about 2 years ago and it has been nothing but success for us. We have quite a few projects but only 4 major applications. Maybe it is that a few of our projects intertwine a bit so making spanning changes in separate repositories was a pain. Doing separate PRs, etc. Now changes are more atomic. Our entire infrastructure can be brought up in development with a single docker-compose file and all…
for example I want to use branch rev5 from project A and rev3 from project B
how I do that in a mono repo, I could not do it in HG, but sure about GIT
Maybe I'm not cool enough to understand this, but I don't see the draw for monorepos. Imagine if you're a tool owner, and you want to make a change that presents significant improvements for 99.9% of people, but causes significant problems for 0.1% of your users. In a versioned world, you can release your change as a new version, and allow your users to self-select if/when/how they want to migrate to the new version.…
Nope. In a monorepo (like at Google), you're responsible for not breaking anyone else's code, as evidenced by their tests still passing.
So you never trample over the 0.1%. Instead you fix your code, or you fix their code for them -- which was probably due to your own bugs or undefined behavior in the first place. Or else you don't push.
And if you break their code because they didn't have tests? That's their problem, and better for them to learn their lesson sooner that later, because they're breaking engineering standards that they've been told since the day they joined. A monorepo depends, fundamentally, on all code having complete test coverage.
I feel terrible for anyone who sees this and thinks, “ah! I should move to a monorepo!” I’ve seen it several times, and the thing they all seem to overlook is that Google has THOUSANDS of hours of effort put into the tooling for their monorepo. Slapping lots of projects into a single git repo without investing in tooling will not be a pleasant experience.
But people seem to forget that it wasn't that long ago that git didn't exist, making multiple repos was a pain in the butt. Managing multiple repos locally was hell. Monorepos were the norm.
Then as the state of version control ramped up, and making repos became easy, and having so much code in one repo had performance issues (overnight CVS/SourceSafe/SVN pull on your first day at work anyone? Branches that take hours to create?), people started making repos per project. The micro-service fad made that a no-brainer.
Now, for companies like Facebook and Google, or really any company that wrote code before the modern days and has a non-trivial amount of it, switching was not exactly a simple matter. So they just poured their energy into making the monorepo work. They're not the only ones to do it either (though not everyone has to do it at Google, Facebook or Microsoft scale, obviously, so its a bit easier for most). And so it works. And then people forget how to make distributed repos work and claim things like "omg I have to make 1 PR per repo when making breaking changes!", as if it was a big deal or it wasn't a solved problem.
Managing dependencies and versions across repos is a pain. Refactoring across repos is quite hard when your code spreads across repos considering the tree of dependencies. Unfortunately Git checkout all the code, including history, at once and it does not scale to big codebases. The approach that Facebook chose with Mercurial seems a good compromise ( https://code.fb.com/core-data/scaling-mercurial-at-facebook/ )
>> Unfortunately Git checkout all the code, including history, at once and it does not scale to big codebases A shallow clone can be helpful in cases like this
I don't understand why gitlab/github/bitbucket don't provide better tools for monorepo. This is a topic pretty trendy. But there is absolutely no tools helping with control access, good ci, ...
What's missing in these is cross-reference, which is not possible without somewhat established BUILD system (caps "pun-intened") - e.g. like bazel/build, then a source code indexer, etc, etc. This becomes very critical for doing reviews, since it allows you to "trace" things without running them, apart from many other things. For example large scale refactorings looking for usages of functions, and other examples lik…
I've been thinking about a tool like this for a long time. A way to attach to each commit not only the diff in the code, but also the list of places affected by the changes (usages of functions that are modified for example). Then during review we wouldn't have only a stupid diff. We would have a list of place to check to be sure that the changes make sense in the context of the project.
I feel terrible for anyone who sees this and thinks, “ah! I should move to a monorepo!” I’ve seen it several times, and the thing they all seem to overlook is that Google has THOUSANDS of hours of effort put into the tooling for their monorepo. Slapping lots of projects into a single git repo without investing in tooling will not be a pleasant experience.
Slapping a whole bunch of projects into multiple repos with dependencies isn't a pleasant experience either. What is the solution then? I certainly don't want to host my own npm/composer/maven/clojars repos or even use those dependency managers to manage my own code which constantly changes and relies on multiple libraries both on the backend and frontend. I've tried this and, at least with a small team of two, it's…
Easy to use, cutting edge updates.
I feel terrible for anyone who sees this and thinks, “ah! I should move to a monorepo!” I’ve seen it several times, and the thing they all seem to overlook is that Google has THOUSANDS of hours of effort put into the tooling for their monorepo. Slapping lots of projects into a single git repo without investing in tooling will not be a pleasant experience.
Both monorepo or "micro repo" end up falling apart at scale without some devops work involved. Either will work if you only have a few dozen projects. Neither will work once you hit 10s of millions of lines of code. But people seem to forget that it wasn't that long ago that git didn't exist, making multiple repos was a pain in the butt. Managing multiple repos locally was hell. Monorepos were the norm. Then as the s…
(I’m also not sure I’d generally categorize tools work as as “dev ops,” though I can certainly see how they end up intertwined.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you’ve just lost your ability to easily make breaking changes to the common code I haven't lost anything, I've gained the ability to make breaking changes because I don't have to update everything that breaks all at once. I don't have to do it at all because that's the job of the team responsible. With a monorepo what happens when their are 17 projects using the common code and I'm not familiar with 16 of them? Do…
You can soft-deprecate the old code path, and communicate that warnings will turn into errors at some future date. You can send your pull request to the affected team leads, and request that they approve it, once they make changes on their end. I mean, the alternative is that you have 17 different projects, each using one of five different versions of the common code. Heaven forbid one of them makes an incorrect assu…
Monorepo also bugs me because there will always be some external package you need, and invariably it’s almost impossible to integrate due to years of colleagues making internal-only things assume everything imaginable about the structure and behavior of the monorepo. There will be problems not handled, etc. and it leads to a lot of NIH development because it’s almost easier in the end.
Also, it just feels risky from an engineering perspective: if your repository or tools have any upper limits, it seems like you will inevitably find them with a humongous repo. And that will be Break The Company Day because your entire process is essentially set up for monorepo and no one will have any idea how to work without it.