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Comment by altcognito | Hacker News Reader

> 30k merges per day

> 25 million CI checkouts

833 checkouts for every merge? That's quite a few. Even accounting for multiple environments at different stages of production readiness, that's pretty weird.

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In a repo this large, there are a lot of tests and pipelines that need to run as code is tested, built, and deployed. Each test shard we run in parallel needs to check out the code, for example.

How about 100GB disk space for a checkout. That's pretty weird too. Makes you wonder if they're the best stewards for code. Makes you wonder about turning claude loose on your codebase.

I personally haven't dealt with a big-corp level of mono-repo. The choices you make might be justifiable to bring in certain binaries as opposed to resolve artifacts from some type of library repo. Especially if they are doing web front ends and whatnot?

And actually, the lack of an artifact server and some sort of proper knowledge of compatibility requiring a CI pull across hundreds of different projects with every merge is probably the explanation. Seems like there is an innovation waiting to happen there.

For local projects I'm using a repo per module/package, creating tagged releases, and pushing them to a local package hosting server. I can then reference those artifacts as dependencies in the projects that need/use them. No need for complex CI pulls, just coordinated releases.

I also have a template repository I use to help with common setup for different project types so I don't need to repeat that every time I create a new project.

For Python it's easy to create an artifact server as the artifacts are just wheel files in a directory with the server listing the directories (packages), files (releases), and downloading the files.

I'm not sure about other artifact servers for other projects.

The build directory for compiled code probably gets accidentally checked in and then removed 10 times a day.

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