Ask HN: How to manage an Angular project with several variations
I am looking for any advice on how to manage this codebase. It originally started out as a demo which then got turned into production code (before my time) and then a few variants (in terms of UI, features) got developed - and these were all different repositories. Needless to say, trying to keep the variants' features mostly in sync was a headache. So they (not me) went and tried to merge all the code into one big bowl of spaghetti... The usual maintenance nightmare on top of a not really designed based on Angular principles in mind codebase.
When I joined the organization, I said "nope" and after groking the functionality of everything, have redesigned everything based on Angular principles (components, etc). Things could improve, of course, the usual ongoing task. But we now have 6 sort of different (UI, functionality) variants and things are more manageable. I still need to rearchitect some overly complex modules, and implement a new backend API and ... (anyone looking for a job?) We have 3 more variations planned in 2025...
3 of the variants are now static in that no new features are to be added unless it really makes sense because they apply to all the variants. But testing (nothing is automated because management never saw the point, so i am pushing for it) to make sure nothing has broken is a giant time sink (so it doesn't really get done properly). One wrong change and the other 2 variants break...
So I am trying to decide if making and freezing three branches makes sense. But then fundamental improvements to the foundation would / ought to be backported. The further refactoring to better compartmentalize the code variations in the variants is an ongoing process as well, so once that is done, things should be easier.
And now open sourcing the codebase (b/c of EU funding regulations) is looming, but parts of the codebase can't be... so I am going to have to deal with maintenance of sort of mirrored repos eventually.
This doesn't feel like the usual sort of Angular monorepo project! Any thoughts or advice very welcome
TIA