jj VS git-imerge

I'm just going to drop a casual shout-out to jujutsu[1]. It's 100% git-compatible—you can mix and match jj and git commands whenever needed, and your coworkers never need know you're using something else—but it elegantly solves things like rebase/merge conflicts (and solves a lot of other sharp edges in git at the same time).

It is one of those rare birds that is both more powerful than the tool that it replaces while also being drastically easier to use. I am (was?) a git power user, and it took me all of a day to replace git with jj, and the rest of the week to become essentially as fluent. I will never go back.

[1] https://github.com/martinvonz/jj

In some cases, yes, but I think the way jj handles conflicts is easier to follow. You can see the conflict resolution in `jj diff` and you can rebase it like a regular commit. rerere's state is harder to understand, I think. See https://github.com/martinvonz/jj/issues/175#issuecomment-107... for some more discussion.

This will be easier with jujutsu(https://github.com/martinvonz/jj)?

We strongly considered Graphite as an alternative to Gerrit at my last job that I mentioned at the start of this post (which I am no longer at, actually) because it does look like an absolutely excellent product, I will admit. You should all be proud of a smart design and smart set of tools.

But there's a really really really really really really big problem. Me and the other main engineer on our team use a custom frontend to Git called Jujutsu[1] for all my development. Jujutsu is about 1000x better than Git. So that's nice.

But gt, the graphite client, is not open source. I have no idea how to make them work together. I have no idea how to extend Jujutsu to handle Graphite stacks, because I don't even think there's an API to handle any of this.

I even wrote a Gerrit integration for Jujutsu to handle this, and Gerrit + Jujutsu is absolutely a force to be reckoned with IMO, even if the UX isn't as nice as Graphite's.

Please! Make gt open source and make it possible for third parties to make and update stacks. This isn't just useful for jj but all kinds of automation that wants to contribute patches -- imagine tools like Google's internal "Code Review ML models" that might recommend you rename a variable based on context. They will suggest the fix for you or even apply it!

[1] https://github.com/martinvonz/jj

Honestly, that's less keystrokes than adding a shellAlias. If you aren't sold on using nix to manage your system's configuration, this seems overcomplicated. If you use nix, then you are already probably frustrated at keeping your nix configuration in sync with quick little optimizations you do on a regular basis. With nix, everything is source controlled. If you are a dotfiler, then you would still have to commit your changes. I guess that's true in my solution as well. The git add in my update is probably the most dubious element of this entire schrade. That is unless, you are using jj.

I completely missed the `` argument despite being the first thing documented under `jj log`. That's definitely the most critical feature out of my list, thank you for pointing that out!

Also, it's great to hear that you're willing to accept contributions for those features. If/when Jujutsu gains critical mass, I imagine that someone will end up contributing these features.

Regarding rename detection, it seems like that is actively being worked on, which is really encouraging! https://github.com/martinvonz/jj/pull/3574

Afaik, there's currently no official way to pause/stash a rebase/merge-in-progress. (There is git-imerge which supports incremental merges/rebases (basically split a big merge into smaller ones), but I never used it and think you'll need to use it from the start of a merge/rebase.)

Try git imerge.

If the merge is large in the number of commits involved git imerge may be useful to you. It breaks down one big merge into many smaller merges, essentially merging one new commit from each branch, one at a time. The advantage being that you only ever need to consider the conflict between two individual commits at a time.

The repo for it is https://github.com/mhagger/git-imerge and the blog post / instructions is at https://wilsonmar.github.io/git-imerge/

Similar ideas have been discussed before in Git, but I don't think anyone has acted on them much. Michael Haggerty's git-imerge tries to make conflicts shareable, but I think it was more of a side-effect of the original goal of optimizing rebase/merge and auto-reducing conflicts to their minimal representation. I'm very curious how conflicts are represented in Jujutsu so I can better understand this power. I'm curious about how conflicts in conflict-resolution commits are handled and other such magic.

That gist seems like a simplified version of https://github.com/mhagger/git-imerge, so check that out if you haven't. (I haven't looked at git-imerge in a long time, so I should read about it again myself.)