I found octopus megamerge hard to collaborate - my colleagues don't use JJ so they may introduce changes that would cause conflitcts to my megamerge. When you have a conflict on a change that has more than 2 parents, the conflict resolution becomes unmanageable very quickly. No merge tool can handle more than 3-way merge, so you have to do that manually.
Eventually I settled on a tree-like megamerge that's more practical: merge 2 branches at a time and merge the merged branch with the next branch. This way I only need to handle 2-way conflicts at a time which is more manageable.
Also you have to be very careful to decide the order when you (and your colleagues) are going to land the branches, or if you expect any new features other people are working on that's going to conflict with your branches. When using megamerger workflow, most of the problems come from coordinating with other colleagues.
Been trying to get into jj lately, but I rely a lot on VS Code's git gutter to review changes as I code. Doesn't look like jj has an equivalent in VS Code. Anyone got tool recommendations?
I have a PR up for jjk that does the full change as a review changes, and there's another user's PR that allows diffs over arbitrary ranges (i.e. when working out whether the commits that make up a PR are good as a whole rather than individually)
Great writeup! I've been using `jj parallelize` [1] a lot (and wrote about it here [2]) to fan out a sequence of commits to set up a megamerge, but your stack alias sounds super useful to create them on the fly, rather than at the very end of a work stream. Thanks for the tips!
Makes me happy to see the influx of jj posts as of late. Great tool. Roughly this workflow is how I convinced a few friends to finally loosen their death grip on git and try something new.
I love this stuff as a hobbyist, but professionally I can't help but think this is all obsolete in the age of agent-driven development. I wish jj was around a decade ago.
I've been playing around with agent-native source annotation to specifically address the massively parallel work problem. Check it out here: https://github.com/draxl-org/draxl
This is something you have to generally handle manually since absorb won't squash hunks with ambiguous targets, but I typically stack these branches and accept the dependency. I have had instances where this has backfired a little bit re: ordering but thankfully with JJ and the very patient little man in my computer named Codex it's easy to reorder them and end up with the same diff
The mega merge wouldn't handle that based on the way the article shows. You COULD have a revset that includes stacked changes, though. That does work and is what I currently do.
It's interesting to see the strange workflows that come from jujutsu users, as someone who works on git workflows.
There's some counterproductive stuff in there from my perspective but at its core you're keeping up a throwaway integration branch, which is helpful practice if you'll ever care about an integration. It's annoying with git because the interface for updating your throwaway integration branch is very clunky and easy to get wrong.
I saw Jujutsu on HN a few days ago and gave it a try. I picked a bunch of it up in just a couple hours and a couple days later I've completely switched to it for all my projects, it's not even close. Git is dead to me.
I just wish Jujutsu supported git tags rather than only supporting bookmarks as branches. And I also wish that Jujutsu supported preserving commit dates during rebases.
One of my absolute favorite things about Jujutsu is how easy it is to manipulate the commit graph remotely without having to manually checkout each commit first. I've been working on some pull requests to their built-in diff editor lately trying to improve the user experience enough that most conflicts will be fixable without having to use a text editor.
Also, the lack of a special staging area means you also never have to fucking stash your changes before you can do practically anything. Your changes always have a place, you can always go somewhere else and you can always come back.
Oh? That's incredibly recent. Thank you for letting me know. As it turns out, I just built jj from source earlier today, so ironically I should already have tags. I'll give it a try.
Re: commit dates, fundamentally those always change when rebasing because you're rewriting the commit object, but we don't touch the author date unless you explicitly reset it with metaedit
Eventually I settled on a tree-like megamerge that's more practical: merge 2 branches at a time and merge the merged branch with the next branch. This way I only need to handle 2-way conflicts at a time which is more manageable.
Also you have to be very careful to decide the order when you (and your colleagues) are going to land the branches, or if you expect any new features other people are working on that's going to conflict with your branches. When using megamerger workflow, most of the problems come from coordinating with other colleagues.
I have a PR up for jjk that does the full change as a review changes, and there's another user's PR that allows diffs over arbitrary ranges (i.e. when working out whether the commits that make up a PR are good as a whole rather than individually)
Though, I'd be remiss not to mention that this (and any other) jj workflow would be much easier with jjui. It's the best TUI around, not just for jj
I proposed incorporating some of this article into it. https://github.com/idursun/jjui/discussions/644
[1] https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/cli-reference/#jj-parallelize [2] https://blog.chay.dev/parallelized-commits
If anyone is JJ-curious, I also can't recommend the Discord[1] enough. The community is very helpful and welcoming.
[1]: https://discord.com/invite/dkmfj3aGQN
I'm still not as smooth at figuring out conflicts on mega-rebase.
There's some counterproductive stuff in there from my perspective but at its core you're keeping up a throwaway integration branch, which is helpful practice if you'll ever care about an integration. It's annoying with git because the interface for updating your throwaway integration branch is very clunky and easy to get wrong.
I just wish Jujutsu supported git tags rather than only supporting bookmarks as branches. And I also wish that Jujutsu supported preserving commit dates during rebases.
One of my absolute favorite things about Jujutsu is how easy it is to manipulate the commit graph remotely without having to manually checkout each commit first. I've been working on some pull requests to their built-in diff editor lately trying to improve the user experience enough that most conflicts will be fixable without having to use a text editor.
Also, the lack of a special staging area means you also never have to fucking stash your changes before you can do practically anything. Your changes always have a place, you can always go somewhere else and you can always come back.
There are commands for manipulating tags (jj tag set, jj tag delete), and recently [1] support for fetching / pushing
[1]: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/pull/9279