Merge several subrepos into bundle repo (monorepoify)

Right now I’m really bothered by the overhead of managing submodules, CI, and releases. Things would be a lot simpler if a lot of things were brought into one repo.

Then I read this: https://danluu.com/monorepo/

Has been discussed a little before in: https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch/issues/70

Things that would improve:

• Most issues would go in the standard activitywatch repo (easier overview, less cross-referencing)
• Open PRs would become easier to overview and cross-repo changes could be put in a single PR instead of spread across repos
• CI would be easier to maintain and run full integration tests on all projects for every commit
• Easier to install

Things that would worsen:

• CI build times
• The contributor stats stuff would have to be rewritten

Repos I’d merge in:

• aw-core
• aw-server
• aw-webui
• aw-client
• aw-client-js
• aw-watcher-afk
• aw-watcher-window
• aw-watcher-web

Things we’d have to do:

• For each repo to be merged:
  • In original repo, check out a new branch, move all files into subfolder with same name as repo, commit.
  • In destination repo, git merge the original repo’s pre-merge branch.
• Move all issues and open PRs

[staltz]

Hi! Thanks for asking for my comment. I think as long as the architecture remains modular (not monolithic), then I think it’s fine to make a monorepo. You can use this git trick to merge in the commits from all repos.

[johan-bjareholt]

I don’t like monorepos, but if we want fewer repos this would be my suggestion of merging more stuff into aw_server like this:

• aw_server
  • aw_server
  • aw_webui
  • aw_datastore
  • aw_transform

I like when the clients and their dependencies are in seperate repos, makes more sense for third-party watchers. The modules specified above should be aw_server exclusive anyway.