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0 pointsloukrazy4y ago0 comments

If you make changes to a large shared module, is it your responsibility to chase down each and every usage of it? For example if you are upgrading a dependency due to a somewhat breaking security issue such as Jackson 2.8->2.12

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jsolson4y ago

At Google it mostly _is_ your responsibility to do that, yes.

There is substantial tooling assistance to assist with this, and it's common to make changes by adding new functionality, writing an automated transform to shift usage from old to new, sharding out the reviews to the suitable OWNERS, and finally removing the old functionality.

Very heavily used common code tends to be owned by teams that are used to this burden. That said, it does complicate upgrades to third party components.

avodonosov4y ago

You do not chase down, the buld system detects all affected modules and runs their tests. That's the advantage of monorepo - contineous integration that includes all dependent modules.

barrkel4y ago

It's also a disadvantage, to be clear. Tests take longer to run when you need to rebuild your database and not just your own code. There's no easy way to put something in maintenance mode and only take changes for bug fixes, because maintaining forks is not a significant thing. Thus downstream dependencies must pay not just for bug fixes but also for feature improvements, deprecations etc.

It works well enough if everything is making money and is being actively developed.

andreareina4y ago

IIRC that's how it works for internal APIs in the linux kernel.

joshuamorton4y ago

Tldr yes it's the responsibility of the person doing the update to inform and usually fix the majority of users. There's often a long tail though.

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