(argh, I wasn't able to post this due to HN's over-eager 'submitting too fast' filter; at the time, I'd submitted all of two comments & one story within an hour

(argh, I wasn't able to post this due to HN's over-eager 'submitting too fast' filter; at the time, I'd submitted all of two comments & one story within an hour — and then I had to restart my browser, which lost the text of this comment) > 1) Difficult to track changes to the code I'm interested in. What's wrong with 'git log $PATH'? > 2) all sorts of operations take longer (pulling, grepping source, etc.) to support code I couldn't care less about. A different format could help here, as can different tools (e.g. ripgrep or ag instead of grep). The time spent on those operations has to be balanced with the time spent updating your code to deal with someone else's incompatible library changes, again, when the other person is on vacation and you have no idea what the new philosophy of his library is. And you don't have any choice about updating, because another one of your dependencies that you really must update has already been updated to rely on his changes. > 3) Frequently have to update the world at once. IMHO that's a feature, not a bug. The person or team responsible for breaking the world is responsible for fixing it, rather than getting to break the world, then pop off down to Barton-on-Sea for an extended holiday while everyone else in the company gets to update his code to use an entirely different idiom. > 4) Encourages sloppy dependency management. My experience has been that multiple repos tend to encourage sloppy dependency management, while a monorepo tends to encourage deliberative, collaborative, professional dependency management. That's just my own experience, and of course different organisations will differ. > I'm sure people will say "if you're having those problems, you're doing it wrong" but the same thing could be said to people who find the distributed model problematic. My own experience has been that multirepos tend to be like dynamic typing and monorepos tend to be like static typing: multirepos can in theory be done right, but in practice they never are, while monorepos work, but at the cost of people having to colour within the lines. Which makes sense for any particular organisation may actually be a function of its maturity: if a place is trying to move fast and break things, maybe multiple repos make sense; if it's trying to deliver quality software, maybe a single repo makes sense.