Last time I tried jj, branches were an extremely laborious process to keep up to date. I don't see how people that aren't working alone can work with that. I have numerous branches in flight at any given time, and my colleagues do as well. The idea of manually keeping them pointed at the right commit is just nuts.
Maybe they've fixed that astonishing choice since then, and I'd give things another go if they did. But branches and worktrees are how I operate.
Regarding the article, I have no idea what is going on as I'm red-green color deficient.
Bookmarks aren’t that bad either IMO, especially with the recent addition of `jj bookmark advance`. Curious if you can say more about the particular difficulties you found keeping them up to date?
Is it easy?
I like Jujutsu so much that I've been working on massive refactors to my tooling in order to support it (example: https://github.com/LoganDark/get-shit-done)
I’m pretty sure `jj absorb` (and its predecessors, `git-absorb` [0] and `hg absorb`) are smarter than this, instead looking at the actual diffs.
> [absorb] splits changes in the source revision and moves each change to the closest mutable ancestor where the corresponding lines were modified last. If the destination revision cannot be determined unambiguously, the change will be left in the source revision.
I use absorb fairly often, fwiw. It's great for when I want to make a patch to a commit that will easily absorb into its right place. And I also, sometimes, prefer the more intentional approach where I decide exactly where each hunk will go.
Basically, if you don’t get into that sort of situation with commits containing parts they shouldn’t in the first place, you don’t need to do any extra work to clean them up. The tip of your branch should be the only “messy” part.
> Some people prefer this, as it helps git bisect work better. Debuggability versus reviewer convenience is the tradeoff, I guess.
Ideally we would have a VCS that made ergonomic to store both history-as-it-happened for some purposes, and the cleaned up, squashed and rebased history for other purposes, ensuring they match
You can revisit the original PR to see the individual commits if you really want.
`git branch` is basically my bookmark tool. I commit for a while, then when I want to remember where I am for later, `git branch wip/topic-a-finally-compiles` or whatever. I can reset hard to it when I want to revert back, or any other topic I need. If I forget to name a branch for a commit, the reflog is right there. Nothing’s lost.
And yeah, a soft reset is basically the ideal way to just say “pretend all my changes weren’t committed yet, starting from $ref” and then I make my single commit for my PR. Easy peasy.
BUT! You can simply ask an agent to commit every meaningful block of work. Or just ask any agent to create a JIRA ticket and start work on that named branch. Or ask it to create work trees and create a PR. Life has gotten much easier without having to fight the command line or confusing GUI UX.
I see there's a similar project for JJ, but it doesn't seem nearly as polished https://github.com/Cretezy/lazyjj
git rebase -i
# squash all the commits (e.g. in vim with ctrl-v)
git reset HEAD^
git add -p
# interactively pickup the RED hunks
git ci -m RED
Jj is not git and is not a git tool, it just (thankfully) uses git as a backend, so you can still carry on with the rest of the world.
In what way is that different from using `git rebase -i` to edit a commit?
There are no modal “sorry rebase failed, best of luck” gotchas. There are no “oops I put the wrong thing in the wrong part of the rebase and now I have to abort and start all over” gotchas.
It’s rebase, but without all the extra work, mental overhead, failure cases, and effort.
Seems straightforward, wouldn’t call it special
Yes, you can do most commit manipulations with git just like with jj. But, users of jj know they're "looking down the power continuum" (to reuse pg's terminology) when they look at git, whereas git users cannot fathom what's exactly the deal with jj. Unfortunately, the only way to get it is to spend a week with it, with an open mind. It's close to impossible to describe it except "it's really neat" and "wow it removes all git's friction I didn't know existed".
And, apparently, there's a pattern of having to try at least two times before it becomes intuitive!
The same problem with vi for example. Which I learned, deeply and for a long time. Maybe I will be break even in a decade or two. And for example, I can code faster than anybody who I know and use vi all the time (or some vi keyset in Emacs or something), not because I type faster, but because I don't need to rewrite my code that many times than them.
The same with jj. I'm happy that it clicks better than Git for some. But I know Git from inside and out. Git was never the bottleneck for me. And really any VCS in the past. If I learn jj, then I don't expect that the effort pays off in a decade or less in the best case. My work's result would be the exact same thing, just with different commands, commands which takes almost no time compared to my other tasks.
We do get it. But have you ever thought that git inflexible nature and full control is what some people people like?
Having three different state for your work (working tree, staging, and committed) is nice for reviewing code. Picking lines and chunk give me an additional mental state to think about the design of the code.
And once upon a time, I preferred history log like the one in the article. But this days (mostly inspired by mailing list development style) I wants the commit in my main log to be either features or bug fixes. Everything else is “wip”, which I will squash. It makes it easier when rewriting history, cherry picking, or just browsing the log.
The big differences are that the jj approach gives you a commit message for the staging change, and lets you jump to some other commit without extra steps.
jj has nothing I need, so it would be changes for the sake of changes. I’m not saying it’s bad, but people do need to realize that their struggles are theirs, not the whole world.
I don't know about all that. All sorts of ex-post-facto automated cut-up-and-splice commits sounds to me like a recipe for an every larger mess. I say maintain git rigor, always. Now, you could say "You only say that because you know git rather than jujutsu" or "if you use git absorb more you'll get it", and theoretically you might be right, but... meh, I kind of doubt it.