Clojurians Log v2

Question: in our current monorepo setup at work, we rely on an alias (`:defaults`) in our workspace deps.edn file to “pin” the versions of 3rd party dependencies across all of our subprojects (via :override-deps). This allows for consistency of builds since all our code is tested and built against specific versions of libraries, and we treat library version updates as actionable tickets that require everything to be updated and tested in a single step. Polylith’s approach has nowhere to “hang” this alias in a single place: the development project and each individual project are all independent “top-level” deps.edn and there’s no commonality. In Polylith, we’d either have to carefully coordinate 3rd party library versions across all components or duplicate our :override-deps into all projects. Is this a pain point that anyone has run into and, if so, what was your solution?

I think we should let the libraries be defined under :dev > :extra-deps and be the master of what library versions to use. Then we could introduce a sync command that updates the library version for all`deps.edn` brick and project files. Most dependencies would be defined in the bricks, but project files may also need to be updated if we change e.g. the version of Clojure itself (or other shared dependencies we might put there). The good thing with the brick deps.edn files is that we almost only change them if we need to add new libraries to them. With a sync command, we just have to update the version in the development project and execute the sync command.

We could also add e.g. keep-library-version to workspace.edn where we can specify libraries that should keep the version that is specified for selected projects. This should be quite rare, but I’ve experienced that we have used different version in development and in production for a library (in a Java enterprise project where JBoss couldn’t be upgraded in prod). My philosophy is to guide people to do the right thing, but not stopping them from doing what they want.

I don’t know what a solution might look like for this — or even whether it would be considered “in scope” — since we at WSN seem to be in a very small minority of people who actually use :override-deps in the first place 🙂

If only the CLI had an option for an extra deps.edn file somewhere, this could be so much simpler…

That sync command/option sounds interesting. Good to know that you already tackled that problem before.

As for running the tests, that didn't answer my question - which was about the project tests, not the brick tests.

I'm talking to other monorepo users to see what they're doing about library versions 🙂

I don't honestly know how much value we're really getting out of this today so we may abandon it anyway. Maybe. Need to do some research and experiments.

Oh, for a bit of fun, I looked into what it would take to start moving our repo over to Polylith: oh boy, that's a lot of renaming namespaces and moving files around!

However, I will be building one or two new apps in the repo soon, so I will use the Polylith structure for those and see how it goes.