[WorldMaker]

Even in a monorepo you can tag releases independently in git. git doesn't proscribe any particular version tag naming scheme and stores tags similarly to refs in a folder structure that many (but not all) UIs pay attention to. You can tag `project-a/v1.2.0` and `project-b/v1.2.0` as different commits at different points in the repo as each project is independently versioned.

It makes using `git describe` a little bit more complicated, but not that much more complicated. You just need to `--match project-a/` or `--match project-b/` when you want `git describe` for a specific project.

[tremon]

That's true, but git also doesn't have tags that apply to a subset of the repository tree. You can easily check out `project-b/v1.2.0` and build project-a from that tree. Of course, the answer to that is "don't do that", but you still have the weird situation that the source control implementation doesn't match the release workflow; your `git describe` example is but one of the issues you will face fighting the source control system -- the same applies to `git log` and `git diff`, which will also happily give you information from all other projects that you're not interested in.

For me, the scope of a tag should match the scope of the release. That means that a monorepo is only useful if the entire source tree is built and released at the same time. If you're using a monorepo but then do partial releases from a subtree, you're using the wrong solution: different repo's with a common core dependency would better match that workflow. The common core can either be built separately and imported as a library, or imported as a git submodule. But that's still miles ahead of any solution that muddles the developers' daily git operations.

[WorldMaker]

I understand the low level details of why tags don't work that way and why git leaves that "partial release" or "subtree release" as a higher level concept for whoever is making the tags in how they want to name them.

I know there are monorepo tools out there that do things like automate partial releases include building the git tag names and helping you you get release trees, logs, and diffs when you need them.

I think a lot of monorepo work is using more domain specific release management tools on top of just git.

Also, yeah, my personal preference is to avoid monorepos, but I know a lot of teams like them and so I try my best to at least know the tools to getting what I can out of monorepos.

[tremon]

Do you have any examples of tooling like that, providing the monorepo tiling on top of git's porcelain so to speak? I had assumed that most of such tooling is bespoke, internal to each company. But if there's generic tooling out there, then I agree, it's useful to know such.

[WorldMaker]

That's absolutely an issue that a lot of it is bespoke and proprietary.

I found someone else's list of well known open source tools (in the middle of a big marketing page advertising monorepos as an ideal): https://monorepo.tools/#monorepo-tools

That list includes several I was aware and several I'd not yet heard of. It's the cross-over between monorepo management tool and build tool is. It's also interesting how many of the open source stacks are purely for or at least heavily specialized for Typescript monorepos.

I don't have any recommendations on which tools work well, just vaguely trying to keep up on the big names in case I need to learn one for a job, or choose one to better organize an existing repo.