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Re:Ask HN: What Have You Learned at Google as a Software Eng... by skybrian on Sunday September 08, 2019 @02:06PM (#20912202)
Well, it depends. If you have an API with only a few direct usages, you might do it in a single commit. Changing API's that have many usages is difficult to do atomically even if you have a monorepo, due to the difficulty of getting approvals and the risk you'll have to roll it back.

Often it's better to introduce a new function and migrate usages to it across multiple commits.

Either way, it's on you to fix everyone else's code, which is a different mindset from releasing a library and letting downstream users do the migration themselves when they feel like it.

Re:Ask HN: What Have You Learned at Google as a Software Eng... by mav3rick on Sunday September 08, 2019 @02:13PM (#20912255)
In Chrome, more often than not it happens in one big commit.
Re:Ask HN: What Have You Learned at Google as a Software Eng... by skybrian on Sunday September 08, 2019 @02:24PM (#20912342)
That's a single project (though a large one). I'm thinking of lower layers where there are many downstream projects.