For some background, I have a web version and two electron versions of the programming environment. Then there is a web runtime and a web server which run on the output of the programming environment. Originally the main repo contained code for all the applications, but also some code specific to one or more of the applications. I had trouble versioning a subset of the repository. I ended up versioning the main repo and bumping the version of all apps if anything in the main repo changed, because I didn't have a systematic way of knowing that only certain parts of the repo changed. Perhaps that is the piece I would need?

I said there were a number of frustrations, but that was the driver.

In the new repo format each repo produces a single library/module, and can be versioned as a whole. When I run an application for dev, I can run a given library from a release or from live code (with a dev server serving ES modules from a configured path). This works well when one of the repos is not changing. But I end up developing in a significant number of repos at the same time, so I just configure it to run from live code rather than release for all those libraries i'm working on. This feels like working with a monorepo except I have the hassle of managing commits to all thse repos. Long story short, right now I am working out of the master branch because I screwed up commits. You may have figured out by now my strength is not in dev ops.