How do you know that? Hint: you don’t. You’re not the first to tell us what we do is impossible, and you won’t be the last.
By the way, I know how it sounds. And I know why a person would fear it. And, I know why they’d be incorrect in their assessment, because, unlike them, I have significant material experience in both camps.
This whole business has had few conceptual ideas that stand apart from fashion and stood the tests of time. A lot of people look down on C now for various reasons, but it's still extremely useful and going strong 50+ years later. Even though I'm older than C itself in the last year or two using it intensively, I found new insights in how to arrange things and what to avoid to make things more robust and maintainable.
It's not likely that hundreds of "microrepos" on github and even rails are The Last Word that people will eventually converge on and be using into the 2100s. It sounds like each repo is its own standalone thing with its own deps. There are advantages and disadvantages to maintaining this kind of thing, some of the disadvantages will only become clear as the deps evolve and mutate. Although you may feel you are in a local optimum with this architecture in 2023, ahead of the game, energized by your belief in it, you probably are not finished evolving your understanding even on the scale of one or five years.
One way or another almost everything in this business is ephemeral, disposable and will be disposed of in favour of something else.
Do you know what does stand the test of time? Design principles that are based on the immutable laws of physics. There's a reason that I can quote Plato to support the notion of partitioning. There's a reason that the basic principles are used in the design of every single significant thing in the world. There's a reason Linux has as many modules as it has (for them, a single monorepo works, but multiple works too -- see any library or application that isn't in the primary monorepo but is distributed via a package manager).
Also, no one said "microrepos". Don't put the current fad's fixation on what I am describing. I'm simply describing structural design. Does thing X and thing Y need common behavior? Is it actually generalized behavior? That's what we have called a "library" since we've been building non-trivial applications out of software.
Are there two disparate business processes that don't need to share states, and you know they don't need to share states because you've done the design work? Those are two separate components. Pub/Sub exists for collaboration between those components as necessary.
I'm not trying to say that our current technique for all things is the end-all-be-all. That would deny the continuous improvement mindset (i.e., the relentless pursuit of perfection) that got us where we are. But, there are things that won't change. Smaller batches will always be (generally) easier to manage than larger. Taking something that has high afferent coupling and adding specializations to it will always be a mistake (See Fat Model, Skinny Controller).
The reality is that there are software design mistakes that are knowably mistakes. They've been known for some time as well and can be measured. Those are the things that we avoid and those are the principles that have guided where we are.
I know this sounds highfalutin, but there is someone on our team that has been doing this for over 30 years (by "this", I mean continuous improvement/seeking perfection) and has studied under many of the greats in our industry. We aren't just making this stuff up.
Nobody is denying partitioning is helpful. It’s the implementation details of that partitioning that cause the debate. IMO using repos as a partition boundary is an abuse of git. And IMO invoking Plato to make a point is not helpful. Argumentum ad antiquitatem. This goes for the “30 years” comment as well: it’s entirely conceivable that they’ve been doing things inefficiently for 30 years. More likely that there is such a huge sunk cost that they are heavily invested in justifying it.
> IMO using repos as a partition boundary is an abuse of git.
How so? Why don't we put our Rails applications in the Rails repository?
> And IMO invoking Plato to make a point is not helpful. Argumentum ad antiquitatem
What I am pointing to is a common thread. Plato, Christopher Alexander, Edwards Deming, etc. What I am arguing for is anything but common tradition. It's counter to what is current "common knowledge".
> This goes for the “30 years” comment as well: it’s entirely conceivable that they’ve been doing things inefficiently for 30 years.
Yes, entirely possible. And if we find a better way to do things, we will be first in line.
> More likely that there is such a huge sunk cost that they are heavily invested in justifying it.
As someone who has worked in monoliths and microservices, monorepos and github galaxies, I think it would be better if we could converge on a monorepo managed by something like Bazel where you can just create a new build target that lists its dependencies, and can work directly with the dependency graph via its querying mechanism. Using repositories to encapsulate dependencies and build scripts I think is much too heavy of an abstraction and leads to poor discoverability. When I have to deal with that I usually wind up treating it like a monorepo anyways by creating automation to check out all repos and manage syncing them.
> When I have to deal with that I usually wind up treating it like a monorepo anyways by creating automation to check out all repos and manage syncing them.
Yes! Absolutely. With one key difference: You can't commit to multiple repos at the same time. You can certainly have them all checked out locally and search across them all, and we provide scripts to do that. Example from the Eventide project: https://github.com/eventide-project/contributor-assets
This is an open source project. Our project is based on many of the ideas and techniques. They've held up for 7 years or so.
By the way, I know how it sounds. And I know why a person would fear it. And, I know why they’d be incorrect in their assessment, because, unlike them, I have significant material experience in both camps.