Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system [LWN.net]

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 22, 2024 2:50 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system by roc
Parent article: Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

> That still requires you to mentally juggle three different kinds of trees: a) some set of commits b) what's in the staging area and c) what's "unstaged", i.e. the working tree. You're used to it so it comes naturally, but it's still unnecessary complexity.

With all due respect, you sound like you're not a magit user :-)

Magit presents everything as diff hunks, so I don't really think in terms of "trees" when using it (every day). I just move hunks around freely. I totally understand how the staging area can confuse a lot of people; I frequently use the command line too. But Magit makes it incredibly natural to use. Ask a friend for a demo?

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Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 22, 2024 10:02 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Having used Magit, a good description of the way it handles things is: "the presence of three types of tree - working copy, index, and commits - is confusing to users. Unify all three into one type of tree, and hide the difference so that as far as a Magit user is concerned, it's all just commits". They do this because commits are the fully featured type of tree, and it's trivial to convert any operation on any type of tree into "turn the tree into a commit, operate on the commit, turn the new commit back into a working copy or an index".

Jujutsu makes Magit's implementation a lot simpler, because instead of Magit having to balance all three types of tree internally, and work out the "correct" way to implement any operation for you, it can instead only implement operations on commits, and get the same advantage. It also doesn't cost any Magit features, since Magit already works this way from a user perspective.