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Great call out. Amazon has an extremely effectively polyrepo setup and it’s a shame there’s no open source analog. Probably because it requires infrastructure outside of the repo software itself. I’ve been toying around with building it myself but it’s a massive project and I don’t have much free time.

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The Amazon poly-repo setup is an engineering marvel, and a usability nightmare, and doesn't even solve all the major documented problems of poly-repos. The "version set" idea was probably revolutionary when it was invented, but everyone I know who has ever worked at amazon has casually mentioned that their team has at least one college-hire working 25%+ time on keeping their dependency tree building.

This really shouldn't be the case as of about 5 years ago, a massive effort was done to get all version sets merging from live regularly and things were much healthier after that. For what it's worth I suspect the usability of Brazil before then was still on par or better than the usability of a unkempt monorepo (which is unfortunately all too common).

Sounds interesting. Are there any public articles available describing this more?

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