Posted by tigerlily 3 days ago
I won't install Rust just to test your software. Make a debian package like everyone else.
I'm not complaining for the sake of complaining, I'm saying if they want to play in the Big Boy leagues, they need to do things right.
If you're on Arch, gentoo, or openSUSE, you can use the package. It is true that Debian has not packaged jj yet.
It'll get there, and it's fine if you'd rather wait until things are more mature.
> If you're not a Rust developer, please read the documentation to figure out how to install things on your platform
Rather selective reading we have here, don't we?
Don't ask me to care about yet another language's package manager, I already know way more than I wish to.
But I found this article a bit long winded and ended up asking an LLM about it instead.
But then after trying jj, I wrote this tutorial because I love it even more.
git was a great step forwards, but its conceptual model just doesn't map well to a lot of workflows, and some very simple things are very difficult or impossible with it. It was designed using a certain set of assumptions and primitives, and other assumptions and primitives turn out to be much more suitable for certain workflows.
I don't know if jj is the perfect answer, but it's a huge step forwards in many ways.
It is a universal undo command. It works for every change in your repository. You don't need to memorize/google/ask claude how to revert each individual kind of operation (commit, rebase, delete branch, etc.). You try a jj command, look at your repo, and if you don't like what you see, you `jj undo`.
The biggest downside for me is that no longer have the necessary expertise to help coworkers who get themselves into trouble with git.
Subversion is a fine VCS. But git offers a better approach with being offline-first and decentralized. It also makes merging branches a lot easier.
I don't know enough about jj to praise it, but I don't think git will be the last VCS that will become widely popular.
git is good, but jj is good, too. nobody asked for a better CVS either, until someone did.
And the UI is pretty intuitive so don't really have to search for a solution, usually the command to use is obvious (tho I guess now you could delegate the UI to an LLM to ask it to give you the right incantations).
If jj is so great now and works with git as a backend, it’s tough to imagine why it’s worth pursuing a native and presumably incompatible backend.
> it’s tough to imagine why it’s worth pursuing a native and presumably incompatible backend.
Well, there's no active work on a "native" backend. There are basically three backends right now:
1. the git backend
2. A simple backend used for tests, you can think of it almost like a mock backend, you wouldn't use it for real work, but it's still useful as part of the test suite
3. the piper backend at google
There's not a lot of reason for anyone to produce another open source "native" backend, because 99% of open source projects use git.