git-branchless VS graphite-cli

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.

This is exactly the problem that graphite-cli solves (https://github.com/screenplaydev/graphite-cli)

It keeps track of branchs and their parents by storing a tiny bit of metadata in the native git refs. It uses that information to perform recursive rebases: https://github.com/screenplaydev/graphite-cli/blob/main/src/...

It ends up working seamlessly - you just modify some branch, and then run `gt stack fix` to recursively rebase everything. (and then `gt stack submit` to sync everything to github :)

docs here: https://docs.graphite.dev/guides/graphite-cli

You can read Graphite's full implementation of metadata handing here.

We (Screenplay, https://screenplay.dev) built an internal tool (Graphite) to enable stacked diffs on GitHub for an individual (i.e. you can adopt it without your team also having to adopt it). It's inspired by some of the internal tooling we had at bigger companies. Specifically, the tool has two parts:

  * The CLI - https://github.com/screenplaydev/graphite-cli: Allows you to create diffs, restack them, submit them to GitHub, etc. It runs locally and stores all the metadata in your .git folder.