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0 pointsdmoy6y ago0 comments

At large enough scale, it causes a lot of problems and breaks like every other dev tool requiring a lot of work to get it back together.

That said, there are some open source pieces to help. Facebook open sourced their mercurial stuffs so you can get version control at scale (and before then you just use perforce). Google open sourced bazel. Google open sourced some parts of the underlying infra behind code search, but not enough to really work properly. And of course lower level there's a plethora of reasonable db offerings, etc.

It would still require a lot of glue though.

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username906y ago

It is just that Googles tooling around code works really well together. Code search to view code and directory based history so you aren't swamped by others commits, tap to run all unit tests all the time but with sectioned projects so you don't run all tests on every presubmit, sponge to gather every test log ever (even for the tests you run locally) so you can link full test logs to coworkers when you have problems (also note that the logs source file links are actual links into code search), critique for easy versioned code reviews where you can diff code between any sets of comments so you can see its evolution and running presubmit checks and sponge links for tests, blaze to make a structured directory dependency management system to make partial checkouts and distributed cached builds work well.

I'd like a set of tightly coupled tool like that working outside of Google, but I guess it might be a just a dream, it is a bit too big of a project.

djhaskin9876y ago

> directory based commits This whole thread is interesting because subversion is exactly this, and works with large code bases. We used to have these told and we moved away from them.

dmoyOP6y ago

Subversion works with large code bases, but not crazy massive codebases.

The version control is just the tip of the iceberg though, and is largely a solved problem: git or subversion, then perforce or straight to Facebook's mercurial stuff.

It's the other tooling that breaks on large enough mono repos that you have hard time with publicly. Searching your code takes awhile. Cross references don't go wide enough or take too long to generate. Builds take too long. Refactoring tools either take too long or don't support the repo of sufficiently large size.

Mostly this isn't a problem though, because few repos are actually large enough to cause real problems.

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