spr VS git-branchless

Newbie jj convert here.

jj is not patch based, like pijul, but snapshots, like git.

A sibling commentor points out the change id stored by jj: it is true that at the moment, this isn't really exportable to git in a native way. However, there is a path forward here, and it may come to pass. Until then, systems like Gerrit or Phabricator work better with jj than systems like GitHub.

However, all is not lost there either: tooling like spr[1] allows you to map between the two universes.

At my job, at least one person was using jj for six months at work without any of the rest of us being the wiser. Some of the rest of us are trying it out. A really nice thing about jj is that you can use it without anyone else needing to, thanks to the git interop.

1: https://github.com/getcord/spr

I use spr and git fixup for this workflow and it's really helped me breakup my changes better, managing multiple branches and stacking changes that way is a huge pain, but this workflow has been huge for me!

SPR: https://github.com/getcord/spr

Git fixup: https://github.com/keis/git-fixup

Yes, but due to its simplicity + extensibility + widespread adoption, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re still using Git 100+ years from now.

The current trend (most popular and IMO likely to succeed) is to make tools (“layers”) which work on top of Git, like more intuitive UI/patterns (https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit, https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless) and smart merge resolvers (https://github.com/Symbolk/IntelliMerge, https://docs.plasticscm.com/semanticmerge/how-to-configure/s...). Git it so flexible, even things that it handles terribly by default, it handles

> Is this for a case where a bunch of people branch from master@HEAD (lets call this A), then you need to modify A, so you then need to rebase each branch that branched from A individually?

Mainly it's for when you branch from A multiple times, and then modify A. This can happen if you have some base work that you build multiple features on top of. I routinely do this as part of rapid prototyping, as described here: https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/wiki/Workflow:-div...

`git undo` shows a list of operations it'll execute, which you have to confirm before accepting. Of course, it's ultimately a matter of trust in the tools you use.

What happens is you work somewhere that has stacked diffs and suddenly you learn how to shape your diffs to make them easy to review. Thinking of how folks will review your code in chunks while writing it makes it cleaner. Having small but easy to read diffs makes reviews faster and helps junior devs learn how to review.

Sometimes this doesn’t happen in which case you end up need to split your commit at the end. This is where git utterly fails. You end up needing git split and git absorb to make this productive.

Git split let’s you select which chunks in a commit should belong to it and then splits that into a commit and then you do it again and again until you have lots of commits. You’ll still need to probably test each one but the majority of the work is done

Git absorb takes changes on the top of your stack and magically finds which commit in your stack the each chunk should belong to and amends it to the right commit

You also need git branchless https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless as it lets you move up and down the stack without needing to remember so much git arcana.