[ori_b]

> Just to be clear, wouldn't the alternative with a monorepo still require that you go back and forth with multiple teams if the commit is not backwards compatible?

No. You just send one diff that changes all the team's code and update everything in lockstep, so at any point in your history, everything is compatible.

Instead of you going back and forth with multiple teams, you're bringing them together to comment on a change in one place. You synchronize on version control history instead of needing to wrangle multiple teams across multiple repositories, and you no longer need to deal with fallout for code change compatibility. You just make the change. Everywhere. In one shot.

[skybrian]

You may have to get multiple teams to review your change before being allowed to commit it. And you have to run all their tests. If there is a problem the whole thing will typically get rolled back, which is a drag because then you have to fix the issue, run tests again and get approvals again.

So, in practice, for large-scale changes that affect many teams, we still try to break up large patches into multiple smaller steps, even working in a monorepo.

A single commit is nice for small patches that only affect a handful of teams, though.