alt Hacker NewsThe thing I dislike about monorepos is that people don't ship stuff. Multiple versions of numpy and torch exist within the codebase, mitigated by bazel or some other build tool, instead of building binaries and deb packages and shipping actual products with well-documented APIs so that one team never needs to actually touch another team's code to get stuff done.
The people who say polyrepos cause breakage aren't doing it right. When you depend across repos in a polyrepo setup, you should depend on specific versions of things across repos, not the git head. Also, ideally, depend on properly installed binaries, not sources.
That makes sense when you depend on a shared library. However, if service A depends on endpoint x in service B, then you still have to work out synchronized deployments (or have developers handle this by making multiple separate deployments).
To be fair, this problem is not solved at all by monorepos. Basically, only careful use of gRPC (and similar technology) can help solve this… and it doesn’t really solve for application layer semantics, merely wire protocol compatibility. I’m not aware of any general comprehensive and easy solution.