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I see a future in jj

(steveklabnik.com)
295 points steveklabnik | 4 comments | 22 Oct 25 17:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | source
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j2kun ◴[22 Oct 25 20:58 UTC] No.45675064[source]▶
> I also don’t mean to imply that everyone at Google is using jj, but the contingent feels significant to me, given how hard it is to introduce a new VCS inside a company of that size.

I don't mean to imply that Google is fickle, but anything besides Google's perforce fork is deprecated every few years. We used to have a proper git wrapper, then mercurial+extensions, now jj is supposed to replace the mercurial thing, all in 7-ish years?

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joshuamorton ◴[23 Oct 25 00:53 UTC] No.45677002[source]▶
I don't think this is quite right.

The git wrapper was never fully supported and had some rough edges (I think it was only ever a 20% project, and also its, like, really old). And the customized mercurial has been around for more than 7 years, I think close to a decade (the client I'm using right now is turning 7, and it wasn't my first one).

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j2kun ◴[23 Oct 25 01:16 UTC] No.45677121[source]▶
I started using git as my daily driver at Google in 2018. I was forcibly kicked off it for mercurial in 2020. The deprecation plan for mercurial is 2026 IIUC. Maybe if you adopted mercurial early it's different.
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yomismoaqui ◴[23 Oct 25 01:25 UTC] No.45677176[source]▶
What was the reason for using Mercurial?
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j2kun ◴[23 Oct 25 02:07 UTC] No.45677403[source]▶
Why did Google decide to choose Mercurial? Based on what I read the main reason was that the mercurial dev team was willing to prioritize features needed for Google to add custom extensions to support its monorepo, and the git dev team wasn't going to reprioritize just for the sake of Google.
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1. steveklabnik ◴[23 Oct 25 02:08 UTC] No.45677408{3}[source]▶
I think you’re confusing Google with Facebook.
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2. martinvonz ◴[23 Oct 25 02:26 UTC] No.45677507[source]▶
j2kun seems to be a googler so I don't think so, but it's true that Facebook also went with Mercurial. I suspect it was for similar reasons.
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3. steveklabnik ◴[23 Oct 25 02:31 UTC] No.45677535[source]▶
Ahh. It sounded like a repeat of https://graphite.dev/blog/why-facebook-doesnt-use-git but maybe it did happen for both companies! They’d obviously be having similar issues. Thanks :)
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4. surajrmal ◴[23 Oct 25 04:05 UTC] No.45678068{3}[source]▶
I can second that the aforementioned reasons are true. The funny difference is that Google employs the primary git maintainer. Git has a lot of customers though so it rightfully is very conservative with development.