"Have a bunch of repositories with an understanding of what an expected file structure is, ala ./projects/repo_1, ./projects/repo_2. You have a master repo with

"Have a bunch of repositories with an understanding of what an expected file structure is, ala ./projects/repo_1, ./projects/repo_2. You have a master repo with a readme instructing people on how to set it up. In theory, there's a disadvantage here in that it puts more work on the end user to manually set that up, but the advantage is there's a simpler understanding of how everything works together." This is what I do. I have something like 17 code repos organized this way, plus lots of testing repos, plus an extra "hub" repo. (Credit to a friend for calling this repo "hub": short, to the point, requires no explanation.) The hub repo is a bunch of scripts and makefiles that configure everything and even clone the rest of the repos for me. It also has special grep and find scrips that will run on all of the repos as their target. The hub repo just needs one env var to tell it where the root of all the repos is. Note that in the file system the hub repo is under the root and a sibling of the code repos, not their parent in the file system. Each code or test repo has an "externs" subdir populated only with softlinks to the other repos on which it depends. The scripts configure this by default, but it is also straightforward to configure by hand if you want to do something non-typical. For example, if you want to have multiple versions of a repo checked out on, say different branches/commits, you can do that and name each directory with a suffix of the branch/commit. Then the client repos can just point at the one they want. You can have all kinds of different configurations set up at any time. Doing this makes it straightforward to know what you depend on just by looking at the softlinks. There is no confusion at any time. There are ways of configuring the system that do not even need all of the repos, so this is ideal. Using the hub repo makefile I can clone the whole system with one make target (after cloning hub), I can build the whole system with one target, I can test the whole system with one target. It is a testament to how well it works that I don't even know exactly how many repos I have. In short, it works great.