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Jujutsu for busy devs

maddie.wtf

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Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#41

Post by plandis »

steveklabnik wrote: post #29
Svoka wrote: post #24

I want to be excited about Jujutsu, but what always bothers me about JJ is that if you search the page you can find 'jj' 47 times and 'git' - 49. Is there a good explanation of Jujutsu without referring to git? May be with some pictures? Am I the only one bad with memorizing SHAs when reading? Also, does it work with other people? Would it work in repo with 5 contributors? 20? 500? EDIT: I am looking for tutorials wi…

> Is there a good explanation of Jujutsu without referring to git? There can and will be, but at this stage in the project's life, git familiarity can be assumed. > Am I the only one bad with memorizing SHAs when reading? Nope! The CLI has nice syntax highlighting to show you the shortest valid prefix, so for example, right now I have something that looks like lzrvnkxl but the initial l is in purple, while the zrvnkx…

> The CLI has nice syntax highlighting to show you the shortest valid prefix, so for example, right now I have something that looks like lzrvnkxl but the initial l is in purple, while the zrvnkxl is in grey. This means I can just use the l when referring to the change. That can be harder to demonstrate in a blog post, which can't know how to highlight this, and so often they have no highlighting.

This is such a simple UX feature that I have ended up using all the time after I switched to jj a few months back.

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#42

Post by stouset »

accelbred wrote: post #39

Is there a magit equivalent? I heavily use magit's interactive features and extensions to the git UI (like spinoff, absorb, or the auto-backup thing)

I am not a magit user but from doing a little bit of reading, all of these commands are essentially first-class citizens in jj. Spinoff seems to be `jj split` (or in most cases literally nothing because the default is to edit a new, empty revision off the trunk), absorb is probably `jj rebase` or `jj squash`, and the auto-backup is either the evolog (which tracks file changes that haven't been explicitly commmited) or the op log (which lets you reset the entire repo to what it looked like before or after any operation).

There is also lazyjj as an interactive UI.

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#43

Post by plandis »

packetlost wrote: post #35
stouset wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say I have five commits in a row ready to go, but they should be reviewed and merged one-by-one. Upon review, I need to make a change to the first commit. How much work do you think this would be in git? How much of a pain in the ass do you think it would be if a later change conflicted with this earlier change? It is essentially zero work in jj. I `jj edit` the revision in question, make the change, and `jj pu…

It's really not a lot at all. The weakness is in "forge" tools like GitHub that add a PR/changelist abstraction on top of git and don't support sequences of patches. If you're using just commits and maybe (mailed) patches you only do a single `git rebase` (with -i if you want) and you're done. Unless jj is literally magic and can automatically fix conflicts, I can't see how it would actually reduce the work involved…

As far as I know, by default Git doesn’t enable the “reuse recorded resolution” feature so if you made a change to the first commit you’d have to manually do the same thing for any subsequent commits.

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#44

Post by 0x457 »

stouset wrote: post #33

For anyone who's debating whether or not jj is worth learning, I just want to highlight something. Whenever it comes up on Hacker News, there are generally two camps of people: those who haven't given it a shot yet and those who evangelize it. You will be hard-pressed to find someone who stuck with it for a week and decided to go back to git. You will not find a lot of people who say they switched but just stayed out…

Reason I like git is because I use like 2% of its features. I don't fall for propaganda that I need to use bisect and co. 99% of git commands I call are aliased to 3 characters, so it's dense terminology doesn't bother me.

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#45

Post by bjackman »

stouset wrote: post #33

For anyone who's debating whether or not jj is worth learning, I just want to highlight something. Whenever it comes up on Hacker News, there are generally two camps of people: those who haven't given it a shot yet and those who evangelize it. You will be hard-pressed to find someone who stuck with it for a week and decided to go back to git. You will not find a lot of people who say they switched but just stayed out…

Counter point: I adopted it internally at Google (there's a backend for Piper, Google's monorepo Perforce thingy). I don't do my day-to-day work in the monorepo but I still jump in there once or twice a week. I adopted JJ because the existing frontend (Mercurial-based) is slow while JJ is fast.

It's nice, I really like it! I'll probably switch to it as my main VCS eventually. But it doesn't feel that important to me. Even though my main work involves quite a lot of annoying rebases which is where JJ really seems to shine.

I dunno I guess it's just that a) I've really mastered git and have a deeply-rooted workflow in it and b) despite my project involving annoying rebases, version control still isn't very high on the list of problems I have.

So yeah I'm basically bullish on JJ as a technology but I think movement from Git is inevitably gonna be slow and steady.

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#46

Post by Svoka »

stouset wrote: post #30
Svoka wrote: post #24

I want to be excited about Jujutsu, but what always bothers me about JJ is that if you search the page you can find 'jj' 47 times and 'git' - 49. Is there a good explanation of Jujutsu without referring to git? May be with some pictures? Am I the only one bad with memorizing SHAs when reading? Also, does it work with other people? Would it work in repo with 5 contributors? 20? 500? EDIT: I am looking for tutorials wi…

Git is nearly universal, so highlighting the areas where jj makes things that are painful in git trivial and obvious isn't exactly a bad strategy. It's also worthwhile pointing out that it is interoperable with git, so your company and team don't have to change just because you do. > Am I the only one bad with memorizing SHAs when reading? I haven't ever needed to memorize a SHA or change ID with jj. What are you ref…

I was referring to tutorial(s), which refer to commits just by hashes. It is very hard to read for me. While git is nearly universal, my concern was about leaning jj and what it is useful for, what are its limitation etc.

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#47

Post by sunshowers »

arp242 wrote: post #27
sunshowers wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think jj just uses the 4 bit (16 color) terminal palette, so if a color is unreadable, you can update your terminal theme accordingly.

Some programs set the background colour and some don't. For example pamix sets the background to black, or tmux's statusline, or ngrok. It's not really possible to define one terminal scheme that always works.

I think it's reasonable to assume that all 12 colors that aren't black or white will be readable on the default terminal background. I sympathize with those for whom that isn't true, but please do find a different theme in that case.

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#48

Post by sunshowers »

steveklabnik wrote: post #26
sunshowers wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think jj just uses the 4 bit (16 color) terminal palette, so if a color is unreadable, you can update your terminal theme accordingly.

This has been the case, but it's worth noting that very recently, support for theming with the 256-color palette has landed too https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/pull/6763

Cool! Don't imagine it would ever be the default, though.

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#49

Post by ants_everywhere »

I'm confused what this is?

Is it just a git frontend for people who are confused by git?

It says it abstracts the backend, but it's not clear how something so git-influenced will have abstractions that work with something like a centralized system like Perforce or Piper that has auto-increment numeric commits.

Some of the design decisions are also not great. Working copy as commit means you have no quality control. The whole point of a commit is that... you commit it. So now you need a separate repo or filter to remove the worthless changes from the ones that you actually intend to commit. Bad commits polluting git histories is already a big problem.

The biggest problems with git IMO are it scales poorly and it encourages commit pollution. Presumably jj isn't trying to tackle those problems, which is totally fine. But I am confused about which problems it is tackling. That's why I'm wondering whether it's just a frontend that the author finds more to their liking.

Re: Jujutsu for busy devs

#50

Post by Svoka »

matthewkmayer wrote: post #28
Svoka wrote: post #24

I want to be excited about Jujutsu, but what always bothers me about JJ is that if you search the page you can find 'jj' 47 times and 'git' - 49. Is there a good explanation of Jujutsu without referring to git? May be with some pictures? Am I the only one bad with memorizing SHAs when reading? Also, does it work with other people? Would it work in repo with 5 contributors? 20? 500? EDIT: I am looking for tutorials wi…

Try https://senekor.github.io/jj-for-everyone/introduction.html . A snippet from the intro: "At the time of writing, most Jujutsu tutorials are targeted at experienced Git users, teaching them how to transfer their existing Git skills over to Jujutsu. This blog post is my attempt to fill the void of beginner learning material for Jujutsu."

Thank you!
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