Components might need to be released “together”, but if they are worked on by different teams, it means they’ll have a different release process, as in different timeline, different priorities.
First of all this is normal, because otherwise the development doesn’t scale.
In such a case the monorepo starts to suck. And that’s the problem with your philosophy ... it matters less how the components connect, it matters more who is working on it.
Truth of the matter is that the monorepo encourages shortcuts. You’d think that the monorepo saves you from incompatibilities, but it does so at the expense of tight coupling.
In my experience people miss the forest from the trees here. If breaking compatibility between components is the problem, one obvious solution is to no longer break compatibility.
And another issue is one of responsibility. Having different teams working on different components in different repos will lead to an interesting effect ... nobody wants to own more than they have to, so teams will defend their components against unneeded complexity.
And no, you cannot split a monorepo into a polyrepo easily. Been there, done that. The reason is that working in a monorepo versus multiple repos influences the architecture quite a lot and the monorepo leads to very unclear boundaries.
> Components might need to be released “together”, but if they are worked on by different teams, it means they’ll have a different release process, as in different timeline, different priorities.
released "together" == part of the same feature. Timelines, release process and team priorities are all there to help to deliver features. If they stand in the way, they need to be adjusted. Not the other way around.
Multi repos encourage silos. Silos encourage focusing on the goals of the silo and discourage poking around the bigger picture. Couple that with scrum, that conveniently substitute real progress metrics with meaningless points, and soon enough you end up with an IT department, full on with processes but light on delivering value.
And no, you cannot split a monorepo into a polyrepo easily. Been there, done that. _The reason is that working in a monorepo versus multiple repos influences the architecture quite a lot and the monorepo leads to very unclear boundaries.
I think you are conflating a monorepo (where boundaries can still be established, e.g. via a module isolation mechanism specific to the stack used) with a "monoproject"/"monomodule", where is no modularization at all.
With monorepos you don't have to manage PRs for 8 different repositories when adding a feature.
In my experience it's hard to establish clear boundaries, regardless of repository kind. It may be more difficult to create features which are tightly coupled across multiple repositories, but people do it regularly. And when they do, you suddenly have to manage and maintain synced features across multiple repositories.
In fact, the repo tool for the android project makes it quite easy to develop features across repositories, thus lowering the boundaries significantly.
i have a monorepo that contains a few different early stage frontend web projects that does not interact with each other at all. They do however uses a shared component library that is also placed inside the monorepo. Tools like yarn workspaces makes sharing the library easy if the projects are located on the same repo.
When I change something on the library, i could easily also run tests across all the projects that depends on it with the latest changes of the library and make sure that my change is not breaking things all over the place, which is also pretty nice.
I am not sure yet if using a monorepo is actually the best way deal with this kind of projects, but for now it feels better than having them on seperate repos and then having to deal with the complexity of sharing the library across repos by publishing it somewhere or using git submodules or something.
I work on a project structured into microservices and use both. There is one global repo with submodules in subrepositories.
So when someone only wants a submodule they can happily only clone that, but when someone wants all stuff (which is the default case), the can clone and install all at once.
> Having different teams working on different components in different repos will lead to an interesting effect ... nobody wants to own more than they have to
... and so nobody really understands how all of the components tie together and as a result it takes weeks of manual testing to release.
First of all this is normal, because otherwise the development doesn’t scale.
In such a case the monorepo starts to suck. And that’s the problem with your philosophy ... it matters less how the components connect, it matters more who is working on it.
Truth of the matter is that the monorepo encourages shortcuts. You’d think that the monorepo saves you from incompatibilities, but it does so at the expense of tight coupling.
In my experience people miss the forest from the trees here. If breaking compatibility between components is the problem, one obvious solution is to no longer break compatibility.
And another issue is one of responsibility. Having different teams working on different components in different repos will lead to an interesting effect ... nobody wants to own more than they have to, so teams will defend their components against unneeded complexity.
And no, you cannot split a monorepo into a polyrepo easily. Been there, done that. The reason is that working in a monorepo versus multiple repos influences the architecture quite a lot and the monorepo leads to very unclear boundaries.