[Abstract] A way to boost open-source contribution to mono-repos

Open sourcing software products more often than not increases their success with software engineers all over the globe rapidly contributing to its development than the case is with proprietary software products. This has led to many organisations including enterprises with multiple software products, with millions of lines of code, maintained in a mono-repository to open source their source code in order to benefit from what the open source community has to offer. Whereas mono-repositories can provide a couple of advantages for maintainers in such an organisation, they provide a real push back to external contributors most especially the one time and first time contributors both of which do not benefit from the mono-repository set-up in any way. This is of essence as the success of an open source software project greatly depends on the attitude of the contributors which can get negatively affected by the first time experience. A good solution should be able to maintain the benefits of the mono-repository whereas addressing the underlying issues of large repository clone size, inter-product dependencies, the bureaucratic processes that arise from a mono-repo. My proposal is to use a combination of tools to achieve this. These may include the use of git-subtrees and sophisticated automations that require minimal human intervention to seamlessly integrate external open source contributions.

Source: monorepo.tools