zlacker

Well, if I had to guess, many current jj users are git veterans who are tired of watching git noobs struggle. The other segment is the git noobs themselves, who never really bothered to learn git and have a deep aversion to reading the manual and doing basic experiments. Just a guess, though.

I think I saw Scott Chacon talk about his git config file and advanced git features. Whoever it was, it mentioned GitButler. That was a good talk. I would certainly expect someone like that to have a lot of interest and expertise in git. But it seem to me that there is also a potential commercial angle to making a new/alternative VCS.

I looked at the mailing list entry you linked to about `git history` commands and thought to myself, it sounds all wrong and redundant. `git history` sounds like too broad of a name for one thing. I'd want to have it be `git <verb>` instead. All the operations listed can be done with rebase:

- `git history drop`: Instead, rebase interactively and drop one or more commits.

- `git history reorder`: Interactively rebasing makes this work already.

- `git history split`: Insert a pause in the interactive rebase. Do a soft reset or something to the previous commit, and use `git restore` to unstage the changes (there might be a more efficient way to do this in one step, but idk). Then, do `git add -p` to add what you want, commit, as many times as you want to split the patch. Then continue the rebase.

- `git history reword`: There is a reword option in interactive rebase mode, and also a fixup-like option to do it as well if you want to postpone the rebase.

- `git history squash`: Rebase can do this now in multiple ways.

Rebasing is not that hard. It is the Swiss Army knife of VCS tools. Once you realize that you can just break in the middle of a rebase and do nearly anything (except start another rebase), the world is your oyster. We don't need to spam people with many more single-purpose tools. We need people to understand why the way things are is actually pretty damn good already, if only they read the manual.

>>wakawa+(OP)
The author of `git history` is a GitLab employee and prolific Git contributor. I think he knows how `git rebase` works.

>>martin+P
That makes his decisions all the worse and in poor taste IMO, because he ought to know that these use cases are well-covered already. Furthermore, I'm not talking to him. I'm talking to anyone who thinks that his patch was a good idea. I am not going to be dazzled by brand names in this conversation lol.

>>martin+P
I think the issue that wakawaka28 has and I also have is, that I don't think we should have lots of "wizards" for specific high-level operations users want to do. Then we will only end up with hundreds of commands, that all do slightly the same. Also it will train (new) users to complain about adding yet another command to do what they want, instead of letting them learn how to combine the already existing commands.

What we should do instead is provide a bunch of primitives, that as high-level are as possible so to not end up with duplicate commands, which is what git does currently. `git history` as a name is somewhat pointless, since the whole point of git is to produce and modify the history. In that sense `git history` already exists, it is called `git`.

I think the issue newbies have is not that git commands are hard per se, but that they don't think in terms of modifying the graph yet, or that they don't know which primitives are available.

>>171862+cm
For what it's worth, I mostly see jj as being to git what you describe in your first few paragraphs. That's why I like it so much.