Google copybara: moving code between repositories

To those who have used it: is it handy for situations where you have multiple repos that want to share a little code, but it's not worth the trouble of extracting a library, referencing it, publishing versioned releases, updating dependent repos, etc?

And instead just "sync" a code folder from one main repo (perhaps containing common domain models) to other repos?

Basically the Go philosophy that a little bit of copying is better than a lot of dependency?

Some other interesting tools in the space. Rust is using a tool called Josh to sync commits:

https://josh-project.dev

The blog post from the Rust people:

https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2026/06/04/how-josh-h...

Meta used to have an open source tool called fbshipit. But according to its open source repo they no longer use it:

https://github.com/facebookarchive/fbshipit

Any others in this space?

Nice, I built something similar ~5 years ago using nested git repos and scripts to accomplish a similar purpose of combined private and public repos.

My shell script definitely wasn't google scale tho!

Cute name. (Naming is hard and important.)