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| ▲ | steveklabnik 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > For someone new to version control, committing to an unnamed branch doesn't seem like a desired operation no matter which system you're using. We have data on this! I can't cite anything public, but companies like Meta have to train people who are used to git to use tools like sapling, which does not require named branches. In my understanding, at first, people tend to name their branches, but because they don't have to, they quickly end up moving towards not naming. > What's wrong with requiring branches to be named? Because it's not necessary. It's an extra step that doesn't bring any real benefits, so why bother? Now, in some cases, a name is useful. For example, knowing which branch is trunk. But for normal development and submitting changes? It's just extra work to name the branch, and it's going to go away anyway. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fascinating. The benefit it brings is you can map the branch to its name. Of the, say, 10 branches you've got checked out, how do you know which branch maps to jira-123 and which one maps to jira-234, or if you're using names, which anonymous branch maps to addFeatureA or fixBugB? More to the point though, what tooling is there on top of raw jj/git? Specifically, there's a jira cli (well, multiple) as well as a gh cli for github as well as gitlab has one as well. When you call the script that submits the branch to jira/github/gitlab, how does it get the ticket name to submit the code to the system under? Hopefully no one's actually opening up jira/github/gitlab by hand and having to click a bunch of buttons! So I'll be totally transparent about my bias here in that my tooling relies on the branch being named jira-123 so it submits it to jira and github from the command line and uses the branch name as part of the automated PR creation and jira ticket modification. | | |
| ▲ | steveklabnik 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Of the, say, 10 branches you've got checked out, how do you know which branch maps to jira-123 and which one maps to jira-234, or if you're using names, which anonymous branch maps to addFeatureA or fixBugB? The descriptions of the changes. I shared some jj log output in another comment, here it is with more realistic messages, taken from a project of mine: @ vvxvznow
│ (empty) (no description set)
│ ○ uuowqquz
├─╯ Fix compiler panic in error rendering for anonymous struct methods (rue-fwi9)
│ ○ uvlpytpm
├─╯ Stabilize anonymous struct methods feature
◆ lwywpyls trunk
│ Fix array return type unification in type inference
That (rue-fwi9) is the equivalent of jira-123, if I super care about it being obvious, I might put it in the message. But also, I might not, as you can see with the other two. You could also pass flags to see more verbose output, if the first line isn't clear enough, but in general, the convention for git as well is to have that short summary that explains your change, so if it's confusing, you probably need to do better on that.> Specifically, there's a jira cli (well, multiple) as well as a gh cli for github as well as gitlab has one as well. These systems do require branches in order to open a pull request. In these cases, I use `jj git push -c <change id>`, which will create a branch name for me, and push it up. This is configured to produce a branch name like steveklabnik/push-mrzwmwmvkowx for a change with the id mrzwmwmv, and ultimately, it's still easier to name locally with m or mr depending on if the prefix is ambiguous. That said, from there I do usually just click the button and then "open pull request" on GitHub, but like, all of these tools (gh is the only one I've used, but I can't imagine that the others do not work, since ultimately, it's a git repo) just work if you want to use them. Other systems do not even require a branch to submit, and so you don't even need to do this. I would say "submit mr" and it would return me the URL for the created change request. Gerrit does this on top of plain old git. > how does it get the ticket name to submit the code to the system under? I haven't worked with Jira in a long time, but with GitHub, if I make a change that fixes issue 5, I put "Fixes #5" in my description, and when the PR is created, it updates ticket #5 to link the PR to that change automatically, no other process needed. | |
| ▲ | Zizizizz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You can name branches in JJ too, they're just called bookmarks. git checkout main
git pull
git switch -c jira-234
...
git commit
git push -u origin main jj git fetch
jj new main
...
jj commit
jj b(ookmark) c(reate) jira-234 -r @-
jj b(ookmark) t(rack) jira-234@origin
jj git push | | |
| ▲ | steveklabnik 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Right, this is a good point: you can if you want to, or if you're working with a system that requires them. Just in practice, anonymous branches end up feeling very natural, especially during development, and especially if your code review tooling doesn't require names. |
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| ▲ | MrJohz 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They look identical to people who don't know what to look for, and who don't realise that these two states are different, which is the key thing. You can also distinguish them by running `git status`, but that's kind of the point: there's some magic state living in .git/ that changes how a bunch of commands you run work, and you need to understand how that state works in order to correctly use git. Why not just remove that state entirely, and make all checkouts behave identically to each other, the only difference being which files are present in the filesystem, and what the parent commit was? What's wrong with unnamed branches? I mean, in git the main issue is that they're not surfaced very clearly (although they exist). But if you can design an interface where unnamed branches are the default, where they're always visible, and where you can clearly see what they're doing, what's wrong with avoiding naming your branches until you really need to? I think this is the key thing that makes jj so exciting to me: it's consistently a simpler mental model. You don't need to understand the different states a checkout can be in, because there aren't any - a checkout is a checkout is a checkout. You don't need to have a separate concept of a branch, because branches are just chains of commits, and the default jj log commands is very good at showing chains of commits. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | My command looks like either: fragmede@laptop:(abranch)~/projects/project-foo$
or
fragmede@laptop:(abcdef)~/projects/project-foo$Depending on if abranch is checked out, or abcdef which may be HEAD of abranch is checked out. If you're having to run `git status` by hand to figure out which of the two states you're in, something's gone wrong. (That something being your PS1 config.) If people are having trouble with that, I can see why switching to a system that doesn't have that problem, it just that it doesn't seem like it should even be problem to begin with. (It's not that it's not useful to have unnamed branches and to commit to them, just that it's not a intro-to-git level skill. Throwing people into the deep end of the git pool and being surprised when some people sink, isn't a good recipe for getting people to like using git.) > What's wrong with unnamed branches?
As you point out, those commits kinda just go into the ether, and must be dug out via reflog, so operationally, why would you do that to yourself. Separate from that though, do you "cd" into the project directory, and then just randomly start writing code, or is there some idea of what you're working on. Either a (Jira) ticket name/number, or at least some idea of the bug or feature you wanna work on. Or am I crazy (which I am open to the possibilty) and that people do just "cd" into some code and just start writing stuff? VCS aside, nothing worse than opening Google docs/a document folder and seeing a list of 50 "Untitled document" files an my habit of naming branches comes from that. Even though I'm capable of digging random commits out of reflog, if all of those commits are on unnamed branches, and have helpful commit messages like "wip" or "poop", figuring out the right commit is gonna be an exercise in frustration. As long as you've got something that works for you though, to each their own. I've been using too long for me to change. | | |
| ▲ | MrJohz 15 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The only thing that changed in the two things you wrote was `ranch` -> `cdef`. Every other part of that PS1 output was the same. Now put yourself in the shoes of a git novice and ask yourself if you'd always notice the difference. At least from my experience, they often don't, especially if they're concentrating on something else, it if they're using an IDE and the visual information about which branch/commit is checked out. I don't think you're crazy, I think you're just too used to this sort of stuff to remember what it was like to still be learning git. When I say people make these sorts of mistakes, I'm thinking about real colleagues of mine who have made exactly these mistakes and then panicked that commits suddenly had disappeared. Similarly, I think to you, unnamed branches feel like something complicated because in git that are. Git makes it very easy for commits to seemingly disappear into the ether, even though they are still there. But in jj, they don't disappear - they remain very visible, and the log UI shows them in a way that makes it clear where they come from. The default log UI is something like git's --graph output, which means you see how the different commits interact with each other. I really recommend having a look at the output of `jj log`, because I think then it'll be a lot clearer what I mean when I say that it's not hard to figure out what the right commit is. |
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| ▲ | tom_alexander 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > any competently set up shell PS1 will tell you that I certainly hope your shell is not running `git` commands automatically for you. If so, that is a RCE vulnerability since you could extract a tarball/zip that you don't expect to be a git repository but it contains a `.git` folder with a `fsmonitor` configured to execute a malicious script: https://github.com/califio/publications/blob/main/MADBugs/vi... | | |
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