I always enjoy how on jj articles, 90% of commenters tried it and switched, 10% never bothered to try it, and 0% tried it but decided not to switch.
I have recently posted some critical questions. I didn't do that because I "enjoy being contrarian" (rather me enjoying a discussion). I did that to flesh out, what the benefits of JJ are. I think VCSs are interesting, I think Git has some issues, but in my opinion most problems are caused by a misguided mental models, I haven't/can't tried JJ. Most things I heard were workflows that are claimed are not possible in Git, but are possible and most-times only a few commands. There are other design choices which I disagree with and which might bother me.
("haven't/can't tried JJ" meaning I enjoy running a stable distro, but wouldn't mind compiling it myself. But Rust and Rust software is a fast moving target, so it is a hassle to deal with if you aren't invested in it's ecosystem. Also it violates the GNU standard, which makes it unfriendly for endusers, but this seams to be the norm nowadays.)
And some people just happen to disagree - doesn't automatically mean they just like "being contrarian". I took the "Yup..." to mean "this is what I was expecting, because it agrees with what I have seen before on this topic".
> I always enjoy how on jj articles, 90% of commenters tried it and switched, 10% never bothered to try it, and 0% tried it but decided not to switch.
And some unknown quantity of readers don't see anything compelling enough to either try it and/or comment on it after they have (or have not) tried it.
It’s trivial to prove that’s not true. Just look at the last popular Jujutsu post on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44643984
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44643763
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44646902
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44645769
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44662803
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44644040
And those are just the replies to the top comment which matched “went back”.
Obviously not everyone who tries something is going to switch, even if you take as an axiom that the other thing is objectively better. But I still think it’s notable that—without explicitly prompting that type of response—so few people seem to have negative experiences with jj given how tribal and passionate engineers tend to be over tooling.
I may change my mind. Especially if they provide a less shit alternative to submodules and LFS. (And I agree this guy is just being contrarian - jj definitely does fix some Git annoyances.)
The "aha" moment you might be missing is that you should consider your latest revision to just be the staging area. `jj commit -i` (shorthand for `jj describe; jj split -i`) is effectively `git add -i; git commit`. If you're worried about accidentally pushing unfinished work, don't be! It won't let you push changes without a message by default, and you update bookmarks (e.g., branch pointers) at your discretion anyway. Both of these mean that `jj git push` isn't going to accidentally push a bunch of in-flight work.
Think of it less like jj commits everything by default, and more like your working copy gets the benefits of change tracking and being able to take part in repo operations even when you haven’t taken a moment to make a commit.
In git I can just revert all the changes and I haven't modified anything important. In `jj` won't I have actually added all of those debug printfs to the top commit of that branch? Now I have to manually revert the edit?
As I understand it, the answer is "aha, but you just have to remember to `jj new` before you do any edits. The problem is I'm very sure I will constantly forget to do that. I guess you could say Git is opt-in to modifying commits whereas jj is opt-out, and I think I prefer opt-in.
I have very little jj experience but does that sound accurate? (Genuine question; I would love something better than Git.)
When Linus and his lieutenants switch over and recommend it as loudly as some do here, then I'll take another look. Very unlikely IMHO.
As a (former) advanced git user, nothing could be further from the truth. We are always the most passionate cohort of jj users in these threads. This is almost certainly because jj unlocks a bunch of additional abilities and workflows that we've been torturing out of git (or given up on, or didn't even conceive was possible) for years.
On the flip side if all you ever do it git pull, git commit, git push, jj is probably not going to offer you much.
>For an advanced git user, it doesn't offer all that much.
arrogant, and completely absurdly wrong. I've used Git for 20 years. `jj` the single best improvement to my development workflow in... well, since adopting Git.
> I used it for a couple of weeks and can't say that it saved me any time or any amount of work
I would bet 5 figures that's a lie.
> When Linus and his lieutenants switch over and recommend it as loudly as some do here, then I'll take another look. Very unlikely IMHO.
So despite all this chest puffing, an appeal to authority would tip the scales for you?
I am an unabashed jj evangelist and I don’t think they’re lying when they say it didn’t save them any time. Adoption costs might be small but they’re not zero. Some workflows are easy with either tool. And some people just don’t “get” it and struggle to adapt to a different mental model. That’s okay!
> So despite all this chest puffing, an appeal to authority would tip the scales for you?
I think GP was simply saying this would be a clear sign to them that if it’s mature enough to handle kernel developers’ needs, that’s a good sign it’s worth the effort to switch. It definitely would be! I can’t wait to hear if and when kernel developers start switching; it will be a huge positive indicator.
This is almost certainly true.
> 9% tried and didn't see any reason to switch, and around 1% have switched and won't shut up about it
This is almost certainly not true. People are far more inclined to give negative reviews than positive reviews.
