Jujutsu for everyone

> Jujutsu is more powerful than Git. Despite the fact that it's easier to learn and more intuitive, it actually has loads of awesome capabilities for power users that completely leave Git in the dust.

Like? This isn't explained, I'm curious on why I would want to use it, but this is just an empty platitude, doesn't really give me a reason to try.

Say you start on Main, then make a new branch that you intend to be a PR someday. You make commit 1. Then another. Maybe 6 more. Now you realize that something in commit 1 should have been done differently. So, you "edit" commit 1. All the other commits automatically rebase on top and when you go back to your last commit, it's there. Same with _after_ you PR and someone notices something in commit 3. Edit it, push, and it's fixed.

You can do all that in Git, but I sure as hell never did; and my co-workers really appreciate PRs that are broken into lots of little commits that can be easily looked over, one by one.

I do this every day in git. “git rebase -i [hash]” fyi.

you think you do, but you don't; jj edit is much, much better than an edit step in a rebase - it essentially keeps rebasing while you're editing, so you can always see which changes get conflicts, then you are free to resolve them, or not, at your convenience.

So you get all merge conflicts at once? How is that better?

it's exponentially better because you don't need to resolve them until you're ready. conflicts are committed to the local repo like everything else, commits with conflicts are noisily warned about and you can fix them whenever instead of having no other option than immediately.

How does your repo work with conflicts? How does it compile?

You have this commit graph

    B --> X --> Y (main) --> Z --> @
     \
      --> G --> H

B is a base; yesterday the name "main" pointed to it, and today "main" points to Y. Z is a commit you wrote that you haven't published yet. "@" means "Working copy", which is a way of saying "what your filesystem looks like." So, at this time, you see the changes from B, X, Y, Z, but not G or H.

You want to rebase G --> H from B to Y. But unfortunately, G conflicts with X. H does not conflict with anything. When you run this rebase in Git, you will actually have to immediately fix the conflict between G and X in order for the rebase to continue. If you do not solve it right then, the entire rebase fails. Git's rebase is actually an algorithm represented by a state machine; you must solve the conflict to proceed from "conflicted state" and `git rebase --continue` the rebase algorithm. (If you imagine what you would need to do to actually implement 'git rebase' as it works today in your own code, this state machine model makes immediate sense.)

In Jujutsu, rebase is a non-stop operation and it always succeeds. There is no state machine. It will update the commit graph to look like this:

    B --> X --> Y (main) --> Z --> @
                 \
                   --> G --> H
                       C     C

Now G and H are marked as "conflicted". If any commit is marked as conflicted, then all (transitive) children are marked as conflicted, too. If you "switch over" to working on G, then you can solve the conflict and commit the solution. That will solve the conflict in G, and also H as well.

But you don't have to do anything. In the above graph, G and H are conflicted, but because they are not a parent of `@`, then it does not matter. They exist in a parallel universe that does not influence your own. You can keep compiling code as usual. If you "switched over" to G, then the conflict is "materialized" in your working copy (filesystem) by putting conflict markers in the files, and so you have to solve it to keep compiling.

In short, Jujutsu separates conflict computation (do patches X,Y have a conflict?) from conflict materialization (make the conflict appear with markers in a file), and materialization of conflicts is "lazy" -- it only happens if a conflict exists transitively in the history of your working copy. Resolution is then done at your leisure.

A more brainiac way of thinking about it is that Jujutsu is a tool for manipulating _commit graphs_, and that is a purely computational notion; adding edges, removing edges, etc are all just basic algorithms. The graph's nodes contain "content" and states like "conflicts" are just defined as a relationship C(X,Y) on nodes in the graph. But all of this is "purely computational." Imagine implementing Jujutsu's rebase command; it is just a trivial reparenting of some graph nodes, something an amateur programmer could do. Calculating the relationship `C` is a bit more involved, but not complete black magic. But none of this involves "reading files from disk" or whatever. The side effect of "update the files on your filesystem to look like state XYZ in the graph" is just that: a side effect that the tool does when it is needed. Git, in contrast, only works through "side effects" in that it tends to only operate on the working copy, and never the "holistic commit graph". And so Jujutsu works at a higher, more "pure" level.

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Fun fact: in some cases, you do not actually have to "switch over" to G in order to solve this conflict, either. It is actually possible to craft a "solution" to the conflict in G while on top of Z. Then you can do `jj squash --from @ --into G` and you can "teleport" the resolution into the conflicted commit, solving both G and H, without ever making it appear in the working copy. This happens in cases like "G modified a file named readme.txt that was deleted by commit X"; all you have to do is "re-delete" the file inside commit G and it is trivially solved. This is something that is, quite literally, impossible to do in Git.