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The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC

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Re: The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC

#201

Post by drob518 »

skydhash wrote: post #105
saghm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that the reason a lot of developers have not learned git in depth is because it's actually kind of terrible from a UX standpoint (lots of inconsistent naming of things and somewhat leaky abstractions), and that Mercurial faced an uphill battle in large part because it lacked compatibility with what people were already using. I haven't used Mercurial, but from what I've heard quite a lot of how jj does thing…

> I'd argue that the reason a lot of developers have not learned git in depth is because it's actually kind of terrible from a UX standpoint Not really. I remember my early years with git and the favt was that I never needed more than clone, add, commit, pull and push. While I’ve done some mistakes that got ne to learn more, especially with creating branches and undoing. I’ve never needed a lot, even when I started u…

Yes, really. You just proved the other poster’s point. He says “a lot of developers have not learned git IN DEPTH” and you respond by saying that’s not true because you’ve gotten away with just using a small subset.

Git is quite powerful, but the cli is a train wreck of complexity and inconsistency. Learning the options to one git command means you’ve learned the options to exactly one git command. No other git command is required to use the same terminology. Personally, I was stuck in “git basics land” (all the basic commands you list) until I adopted Magit in Emacs. IMO, the Magit team deserves a medal for making git usable at an advanced level.

I don’t have an opinion about jj yet, but no one can hold up git as a pinnacle of great source control. Yes, it’s powerful, but it’s a UI train wreck.

Re: The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC

#202

Post by mcookly »

steveklabnik wrote: post #91
underdeserver wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't it partially owned by Google? Or are they just a contributer now?

I like to compare Google and jj to Mozilla and Rust: Google employed Martin and some other maintainers, but it's always been an OSS project under the Apache 2.0 license. That being said, there's a few things that lead to this perception: the first is that it used to be under Google's GitHub account, but is now under its own org. The second is that contributing to jj does require signing Google's CLA. That is somethin…

Would the CLA makes it easier to move away from Google and transfer the ownership to a new organization (if Google is willing)?

Re: The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC

#203

Post by pjmlp »

p_l wrote: post #199
pjmlp wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Mercurial fanboy, git took off thanks to being from Linus, and a requirement to contribute to the Linux kernel, from there the adoption wind was in motion.

As someone who was a mercurial fanboy too, critical element was that Github happpened for git while mercurial had nothing comparable - and before anyone points at bitbucket, it fucking sucked in UX

Yet UX wasn't a problem for Git adoption.

Re: The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC

#204

Post by Shish2k »

drsouth wrote: post #57
steveklabnik wrote: post #4

Working with Martin has been a real pleasure, and we'll have some more stuff to talk about very soon!

Will this have any chance if Jujutsu/jj doesn't get more traction? The effort to learn a new VCS is less than for a programming language, but many developers have not learned git in depth, and Mercurial and others have not gained a lot of traction.

> many developers have not learned git in depth

TBH learning git in depth was a hindrance for me learning jj - for my first few weeks I kept instinctively looking for complex solutions to simple problems and being confused, when the answer was always "use the tools you already know"

As a concrete example - git has one set of commands for managing commits, a different set of commands for managing the index, a third set of commands for managing stashes, a fourth set of commands for managing the working directory, and a fifth set of commands for managing conflicts -- in jj all of those things are a single concept with a single set of commands, equally (if not more) powerful, but also simpler

Re: The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC

#205

Post by KingMob »

brilliantee wrote: post #194
anonreplier wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who says it's too complex to have multiple implementations? It's under an open source license notably unlike BitKeeper, what's the problem?

Git had a very small initial implementation, while jj is under development for years and is large. If jj is not too complex to have multiple implementations, why have new implementations not sprung up by now? Is it the Google CLA, or are too few people using jj, or is jj too complex, or some mixture of all of the above? The Google CLA is still required as of 2026, which I find strange. https://lwn.net/Articles/958805…

> why have new implementations not sprung up by now?

Nobody wants to yet?

FWIW, while there aren't multiple reimplementations of the core yet, there ARE multiple GUI and wrapper projects that fulfill various needs, if you're just looking for outside contribution as a health measure.

Re: The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC

#206

Post by jrimbault »

dullcrisp wrote: post #162
umvi wrote: post #142

I like the idea of jujutsu, but I must not operate at a scale where its "killer features" would truly shine. Git hardly ever gets in my way, I have never had to do complex octopus merges or anything like that. It's usually: feature branch, implement, merge, and occasionally fix a merge conflict. JJ seems like it's more for people that like to have tons of active branches that they are constantly switching between whe…

I don’t know about you, but if you ever run git commit --amend, git rebase -i, git reset, git reset --hard, git stash, git add ., git push --force-with-lease, then these are all workflows that jujutsu makes easier and less error-prone.

What if I _want_ a staging area?

Re: The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC

#207

Post by upslefts »

ncphillips wrote: post #152
y1n0 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a skeptic until a few months ago. It’s my daily driver now. I’ve got sizable amount of people committing to the same repo, many are not skilled with git. So I deal with weird crazy “how did you ever get the repo into this state” issues not infrequently. JJ is just so low friction. The seamless and painless shuffling of commits, working up and down the commit chain without explicit rebasing, unchanging change-id…

Same experience. At first I really didn’t get it and now I could never go back. The ease of rebasing, renaming, reordering, splitting, etc. Has drastically changed the way I work. My PRs are undoubtably much better now, and I am never afraid of messing up thanks to jj undo and the op log in general

Do you have a public example of an open source project that you are using that showcases those features?

In your opinion, is jj losing steam? How do you feel about it requiring a CLA to contribute to, which would enable the developers to go closed-source and keep all the contributions of the community? Are you afraid of vendor lock-in?

Re: The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC

#209

Post by markalby »

dullcrisp wrote: post #198
1718627440 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - shuffling commits around with squash, split, and rebase is much better than git’s interactive rebase Can you explain this to me? I feel like Git is pretty easy there. - select oldest commit to modify - move the commits around with a mouse or the cursor - close the editor to apply Sure, the first step can go away (which is what they do with git history), but the rest seems pretty optimal to me. Alternatively I can…

It does take a few days to stop missing interactive rebase. But say you’re in the middle of working on something and you wish you had a commit you made last week on an experimental branch on the current branch before the last commit you made. That’s jj rebase -r oldercommit --before @-, without interrupting your work. I don’t like to think about how I’d do that with git.

that’s the first example I’ve seen these last year so that makes sense to me about jj having better commit management.

I rebase a lot using Fork (git gui) and it’s really easy to drag and drop reorder commits, rename, apply as fixups or squash in. I can see how jj makes sense if you’re in the command line, though. And splitting changes from commits in git is really annoying, but it only comes up once in a blue moon for me.

Re: The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC

#210

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

dullcrisp wrote: post #198
1718627440 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - shuffling commits around with squash, split, and rebase is much better than git’s interactive rebase Can you explain this to me? I feel like Git is pretty easy there. - select oldest commit to modify - move the commits around with a mouse or the cursor - close the editor to apply Sure, the first step can go away (which is what they do with git history), but the rest seems pretty optimal to me. Alternatively I can…

It does take a few days to stop missing interactive rebase. But say you’re in the middle of working on something and you wish you had a commit you made last week on an experimental branch on the current branch before the last commit you made. That’s jj rebase -r oldercommit --before @-, without interrupting your work. I don’t like to think about how I’d do that with git.

> say you’re in the middle of working on something and you wish you had a commit you made last week on an experimental branch on the current branch before the last commit you made. That’s jj rebase -r oldercommit --before @-, without interrupting your work. I don’t like to think about how I’d do that with git.

This is the best pitch for jj I have seen yet. This should practically be the first text on their website.

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