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Is it? I'm slightly struggling to understand what benefit you gain from having the "parent" repo but also having individual submodules. Sure, working in each in

Is it? I'm slightly struggling to understand what benefit you gain from having the "parent" repo but also having individual submodules. Sure, working in each individual project's module makes cloning faster, until you need to work on a module that references another module (at which point you need to check out the parent repo or risk using the wrong version), and now every change you make needs two commits (one to the sub-repo, and one to the base to bump the submodule reference),

steffres 3y ago
In our case, we have a codebase that involves two submodules: one for persistence and one for python based management of internal git repos. Both of these are standalone applications and can run on their own. They are then used in a parent repo which represents the overarching architecture, which calls into the submodules. The advantage of this is, that work can be done by devs on the individual modules without much knowledge of the overarching architecture, nor strong code ties into it. Right now our persistence is done with SQL, but we could swap it with anything else, e.g. mongo, and the parent codebase wouldn't notice a thing since the submodule only returns well defined python objects. Of course, this comes at the cost of higher number of commits as you mentioned. But in my opinion these are still cheap because they only affect trivial quantity and not brain-demanding quality.
- marksomnian 3y ago
  But what do you do as soon as one of the submodules has a dependency on another? I imagine you might not hit it in your simple case, but I feel like scenarios like that are where the advantages of monorepos lie. To take a concrete example, I'm working on a codebase that houses both a Node.js server-side application and an Electron app that communicates with it (using tRPC [0]). The Electron app can directly import the API router types from the Node app, thus gaining full type safety, and whenever the backend API is changed the Electron app can be updated at the same time (or type checks in CI will fail). If this weren't in a monorepo, you would need to first update the Node app, then pick up those changes in the Electron app. This becomes risky in the presence of automated deployment, because, if the Node app's changes accidentally introduced a breaking API change, the Electron app is now broken until the changes are picked up. In a monorepo you'd spot this scenario right away. (Mind you, there is still the issue of updating the built Electron app on the users' machines, but the point remains - you can easily imagine a JS SPA or some other downstream dependency in its place.) [0]: https://trpc.io/ https://trpc.io/
  - steffres 3y ago
    yes, if one submodule would depend on another, this would cause problems indeed. So far, we could avoid it though, by strict encapsulation. But I definitely see the point in your example and wouldn't follow through with submodules there probably too. It's just that in OP's link, I'm quite sceptical as the monorepo approach requires quite some heavy tweaking.

steffres 3y ago

In our case, we have a codebase that involves two submodules: one for persistence and one for python based management of internal git repos. Both of these are standalone applications and can run on their own. They are then used in a parent repo which represents the overarching architecture, which calls into the submodules. The advantage of this is, that work can be done by devs on the individual modules without much knowledge of the overarching architecture, nor strong code ties into it. Right now our persistence is done with SQL, but we could swap it with anything else, e.g. mongo, and the parent codebase wouldn't notice a thing since the submodule only returns well defined python objects. Of course, this comes at the cost of higher number of commits as you mentioned. But in my opinion these are still cheap because they only affect trivial quantity and not brain-demanding quality.

marksomnian 3y ago
But what do you do as soon as one of the submodules has a dependency on another? I imagine you might not hit it in your simple case, but I feel like scenarios like that are where the advantages of monorepos lie. To take a concrete example, I'm working on a codebase that houses both a Node.js server-side application and an Electron app that communicates with it (using tRPC [0]). The Electron app can directly import the API router types from the Node app, thus gaining full type safety, and whenever the backend API is changed the Electron app can be updated at the same time (or type checks in CI will fail). If this weren't in a monorepo, you would need to first update the Node app, then pick up those changes in the Electron app. This becomes risky in the presence of automated deployment, because, if the Node app's changes accidentally introduced a breaking API change, the Electron app is now broken until the changes are picked up. In a monorepo you'd spot this scenario right away. (Mind you, there is still the issue of updating the built Electron app on the users' machines, but the point remains - you can easily imagine a JS SPA or some other downstream dependency in its place.) [0]: https://trpc.io/ https://trpc.io/
- steffres 3y ago
  yes, if one submodule would depend on another, this would cause problems indeed. So far, we could avoid it though, by strict encapsulation. But I definitely see the point in your example and wouldn't follow through with submodules there probably too. It's just that in OP's link, I'm quite sceptical as the monorepo approach requires quite some heavy tweaking.