[krick]

I've read it, but it doesn't quite answer my question. What I'm hearing is basically "well, it's nicer". Sure, I can believe that even not delving into the subject, because pretty much everything is nicer than git. A bunch of aliases and 3rd party diff are nicer than default git too, I don't think this is what we are talking about. But what problem it solves?

You are saying that rebase-interactive workflow is broken. I do rebase-interactive a lot. Well, maybe it is broken, maybe I would get annoyed about it beyond belief if I spent as much time messing with its internals as you (supposedly) did. But I don't think I often have problems with it as a user. I guess conflict-handling could have been much smarter, but if I keep "temporary" commits very small and atomic it somehow manages to do the job better than I sometimes expect, and in the end I don't think I have any problems with it whatsoever. So, once again, what is the problem jj solves? Can you give some practical, not overly-contrived example when using jj over git is not "nice", but significantly useful, when it saves me somehow?

[sunshowers]

(A <- B means that A is a parent of B.)

Let's say you have a stack of three commits, A <- B <- C. Let's say you do a git rebase -i with edit commands on A and B. You make some changes to A, then you go and edit B.

But then you realize that some changes you wanted to make to B, you want to make to A instead -- you want to go back to A.

git rebase -i doesn't let you go back to A. (In other words, the modal nature of git rebase -i means that you can't do a rebase -i inside of a rebase -i.) Instead, you must complete the rebase -i and go to C, and start a new rebase -i.

Now that doesn't sound like a problem, but let's say C is not just 1 commit, it's 10 or even 20. And maybe there are branches with experimental work that you're grabbing bits and pieces of.

  A <- B <- C1 <- C2 <- C3 <- C4 ... C9 <- C10
                         ^     ^
                         |     |
                        E1    E2

And those commits have significant merge conflicts that you must resolve immediately before you can go back to A.

In contrast, Jujutsu isn't modal. You can freely move up and down a stack, and merge conflict resolution can be deferred until later.

(This isn't a contrived example. I literally just finished up a few weeks' work on a stack of 14 rather substantial commits. At its peak, 12 commits were outstanding, totaling around 15k lines of code. Jujutsu handled this extremely well.)

edit: apologies, monospace formatting isn't working well on HN. But I hope you get the gist.

[krick]

Thanks, this is something to consider at least. However, it doesn't convince me still. While I understand your problem, this problem doesn't really occur in my workflow, so a tool that encourages this workflow doesn't seem appealing and I cannot answer myself yet, why would I need to introduce this problem.

This is because I pretty much never use "edit". Well, not "never", but I avoid it, and it is perfectly avoidable in the vast majority of cases. Also, I don't like to deal with conflicts, as they are error prone, so I try to avoid them as well. Every time I want to change something in an old commit (on the same branch) I'll just add a new commit with barely comprehensible commit message, and I commit every little change. Also, if there is an atomic change in 2 files (function renamed), I usually commit them separately, including file name in the message. Then, after finishing some significant part of work, I'll rebase -i master, reorder commits and most of these "new" fixes will end up with "f" modifier after an olde commit, some I'll just drop. I'll do it in multiple iterations, to see which (reordering) operation results in a conflict, to keep conflict resolution operation as small and straight-forward as possible. So being modal is a good thing, as I'll run rebase a half-dozen times, before changes made up to the moment are all cleared up and I can move forward with committing new stuff. I never want to stay inside of one "rebase" operation for long, if I do, I'll probably --abort, and stop to reconsider what I'm doing here.

Even if "editing" past commit would be completely effortless, I just don't want to do that, because I don't want to think about how "later" changes might affect this place. When I do that, there is a whole new class of potential human mistakes one could make, that just doesn't exist when you always work on the "latest" version of the code. In worst case scenario, I might break some intermediate commit when carelessly reordering stuff, but the final code result must remain the same as before I did rebase. If this isn't the case, there is this uncomfortable scenario that I make some edit which is logically incompatible with a "later" conflict, which I won't notice if it doesn't cause a conflict: and it totally might not cause a conflict. I don't want to worry about that.

[sunshowers]

It is certainly possible that this particular improvement isn't hugely relevant to you. However this is well beyond "it's nicer" -- it has been a game-changer for me, and the core ideas Jujutsu is built out of result in many such improvements across all kinds of workflows. And I want to emphasize again that this is not contrived; it is how I actually did some work recently.

But also, tools shape our behaviors. Your current workflows are influenced by how Git works, and it's quite possible with Jujutsu you'll change your workflows. Maybe in a direction that you'll like more in the end.

[martinvonz]

One simple example is undo. You can simply run `jj undo` if you made a mistake (it obviously won't unpush commits to a remote and such). You can go back as many steps as you like.