Comment by microtherion
5 years ago
Under regular circumstances, you can't just walk in and change another team's header files, nor force them to make a particular change you want to make happen, so normally, it would be very difficult to make changes affecting so many different projects.
It's also true that projects with strict rules about what each individual commit fixes can make it hard to fix a bunch of highly related bugs at once. Patch-based OSS projects can be like this too.
Is that an Apple thing? Because I've definitely worked on large-scale commercial projects where changes to everyone's includes were routine.
What I described is an Apple thing. I would not know practices at other companies. I'm sure there are other ways of organizing work.
Then again, an OS and its associated apps are very large scale indeed, and have grown by necessity over a very long period of time, by a very heterogeneous team. Not sure if your large scale projects had similar concerns.