21–30 of 283 posts
What is ERSC?
I wrote about why I joined the company back when I did previously here: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/i-see-a-future-in-jj/
In short: we are building a next generation source control system for the enterprise.
Someone will have to explain the value proposition to me... We have git. jujutsu works with git. git can do everything jujutsu can do (otherwise, jujutsu couldn't work with git). Thus, jujutsu is a UX / new steering wheel. ERSC is trying to be a GitHub competitor with what surplus value? Don't get me wrong, GitHub has a slew of its own problems, but I have not seen any commentary on how ERSC addresses any of the down…
We'll be saying more about this very soon, but the short version is this: we are not building a GitHub competitor in the way that SourceHut or Codeberg are. We are building infrastructure for enterprises, not a social coding site. While jj works with git, it doesn't have to. jj has the ability to work with many backends. Git is the popular one in the open source world, but that doesn't mean that other ones are not po…
Someone will have to explain the value proposition to me... We have git. jujutsu works with git. git can do everything jujutsu can do (otherwise, jujutsu couldn't work with git). Thus, jujutsu is a UX / new steering wheel. ERSC is trying to be a GitHub competitor with what surplus value? Don't get me wrong, GitHub has a slew of its own problems, but I have not seen any commentary on how ERSC addresses any of the down…
We'll be saying more about this very soon, but the short version is this: we are not building a GitHub competitor in the way that SourceHut or Codeberg are. We are building infrastructure for enterprises, not a social coding site. While jj works with git, it doesn't have to. jj has the ability to work with many backends. Git is the popular one in the open source world, but that doesn't mean that other ones are not po…
Looking forward to using the VCS stuff you'll create :- )
That’s amazing news. Can you share more about your tech stack? I suppose it’s mainly built with Rust?
Rust is the default language for all of our non-frontend web stuff, yes.
Someone will have to explain the value proposition to me... We have git. jujutsu works with git. git can do everything jujutsu can do (otherwise, jujutsu couldn't work with git). Thus, jujutsu is a UX / new steering wheel. ERSC is trying to be a GitHub competitor with what surplus value? Don't get me wrong, GitHub has a slew of its own problems, but I have not seen any commentary on how ERSC addresses any of the down…
FWIW I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. As a trivial counter example Git does not currently have a way to store conflicts inside commits[1], which is one of our major features. The way this works is that we basically store the sides of the conflicting trees in the Git object database (and another conflicted tree pointing to all of them), but the actual data structure representing the conflict as Jujutsu understands it is stored elsewhere. Git will be very confused looking at a conflicted tree object created by Jujutsu -- it shouldn't break but it doesn't understand what it's seeing. So, if a object can be stored in the database that is correct but Git can't really "view" it properly, does "git" (or capital-G Git) support it or not? Depends on who you ask, I guess. The storage layout being intimately tied to Git "as a thing", part of its identity, is one of the most interesting properties it has.
The way I see it is this. Jujutsu uses the Git storage layout on disk. But basically all of the algorithms and UX between the two are completely different. That is where most of the real differences are. To the extent we integrate with lots of fiddly Git details (eg tracking branches, remote integration etc) so that `git` commands work -- that's more necessity to make the UX nice. We could absolutely use the on disk Git format but in a way that was inscrutible to the `git` CLI, it just obviously would not be very nice.
As a disclosure I work at ERSC but I am also one of the maintainers of Jujutsu; this post is written with my maintainer hat on.
[1] At Git Merge last year, Elijah Newren prototyped and demo'd a really early and cool example of storing first class conflicts in Git, based on his work on ort-merge. So this might not be true forever :)