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A comment on Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository (2016). Parent comment

Re:Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single R... by not_kurt_godel on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @02:31AM (#17607255)
> you’ve just lost your ability to easily make breaking changes to the common code

It should be hard to make breaking changes in common code. Even 'trivial' breaking changes seem to have a way of breaking things even when they shouldn't. If you need to make a breaking change to common code, the proper way to do it is add the new functionality separately, deprecate the old functionality (i.e. with javadoc so it gets called out explicitly by the IDE), and incorporate it 1-by-1 into consumers until none are using the deprecated version anymore.

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Re:Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single R... by lclarkmichalek on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @05:32AM (#17607978)
And you can do that in a monorepo. But realistically, there are plenty of trivial breaking changes (renaming Foo to FooX) that don't warrant that effort, and so usually don't get done outside of monorepos.

You should apply care when making breaking changes. Having it be hard is a separate issue - I'd say distractions from multi repo tooling would introduce more risks overall. Having a unified CI system in a monorepo is really nice.

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