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0 pointstiglionabbit7y ago0 comments

What you're proposing goes a step beyond multiple repos and into package versioning.

That is one viable workflow: Make a change to the common code and publish it as a new package version while allowing all existing code to continue to use the old package. Then, migrate other projects to the newer version of the dependency one by one.

Allowing multiple versions of the same code to exist in production at once adds complexity. It's a trade-off.

Also, if you're doing this with code that is ultimately webpacked to run in a web browser and you don't pay attention to the full tree of dependencies you're working with, there's a chance you end up loading two versions of the same library into a single web page, increasing the page weight and possibly causing incompatibilities in event handling.

Google prefers to simply have one master version of the entire company at a time.

I've spent a lot of time wondering which solution is the best and I'm still not sure.

0 comments

shados7y ago

> Also, if you're doing this with code that is ultimately webpacked to run in a web browser and you don't pay attention to the full tree of dependencies you're working with, there's a chance you end up loading two versions of the same library into a single web page, increasing the page weight and possibly causing incompatibilities in event handling.

You probably should have a way to visualize bundle size increases in PRs easily, so that this becomes obvious. Alternatively, some package managers like Yarn let you flatten the dependency tree, forcing you to pick one version of everything. Even with a monorepo, since you'll likely be using 3rd party dependencies, it's always an interesting exercise because of how hard NPM makes this: getting to a point where you only have 1 version of every 3rd party package can be very, very hard as some combinations of libs are mutually exclusive.

slavik817y ago

It almost certainly depends on the company. Consider General Electic's microwave oven firmware and hydroelectric control station software. Both might actually share some code. Maybe they both use GEEventLoop or GEHardwareButton or something. But there's no reason to be concerned about having different versions in production at once.

I don't think there's a universal answer to your question.

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