[weinzierl]

I tried to get into Jujutsu several times and tried to love it, but somehow it seems there is little overlap between the issues I have with git (which there are plenty) and the problems jj tries to solve.

My impression is that the main motivation behind jj is that Google realized how difficult and costly it is to train all new hires in their internal tooling but did not want to open-source it completely. So they came up with a thin UI layer, made it workable with git as a backend and published it in the hope it will catch on.

[bjackman]

I have no opinion on whether JJ is good but I am pretty confident your impression about the reason for its shortcomings is wrong.

Google has a basically tolerable and pretty easy-to-learn Mercurial-based frontend for its bizarre legacy Perforce system.

Everything about JJ screams to me that it's been created as the passion project of someone who really wants to build a better VCS, making it compatible with Git was necessary to give it a chance of adoption, and making it compatible with Piper (Google's Perforce thing) was a way to get it funded as a potential benefit to Google.

Top-down Google engineering would never produce a project like this IMO.

[oniony]

I thought Google moved off of their struggling Perforce server onto their homegrown Piper VCS.

[bjackman]

Piper is an extended reimplementation of Perforce

(Piper is piper, expanded recursively. It's so meta, even this acronym)

[steveklabnik]

And while it's not public, jj has a piper backend, so that folks at Google can use jj

(This is also why I have some confidence that jj truly is backend agnostic, it has two real backends already.)

[arxanas]

It's certainly true that jj's features won't appeal to everyone. I think a lot of its features are quality-of-life features (consistent commands and concepts, general undo), and a lot of its features don't help a certain class of users (flexible commit rewriting/rebasing), so it's not surprising that some seasoned Git users won't find it that helpful.

I think it's unfair to call it a "thin UI layer". My own project git-branchless https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless might more legitimately be called a "thin UI layer", since it really is a wrapper around Git.

jj involves features like first-class conflicts, which are actually fairly hard to backport to Git in a useful way. But the presence of first-class conflicts also converts certain workflows from "untenable" to "usable".

Another comment also points out that it was originally a side-project, rather than a top-down Google mandate.

[aseipp]

Your impressions are not correct. Jujutsu's creation and its Git support both predate Google's direct involvement or its anointment as the eventual successor to Fig (Google's internal fork of Mercurial). Martin just happened to work there at the time he started jj, and only later did it become his full-time job to work on it. Though the occasional Googler who isn't Martin will contribute a patch or two when they want to fix something, Google otherwise isn't really involved.