Comment by tharkun__
4 months ago
SVN was not fine. Branching took forever (all the copying). And the space that required ... In fact, lots of things took forever on large-ish repos. Remember that everything required the server and network and disk speeds were slower back then. And just a commit could destroy your work if you got stuck in a conflict resolution. So you'd have to copy all the files you changed to a backup just in case, then delete them if the resolution went OK etc.
Was it better than CVS in some way? Sure.
But git is just better in so many ways. Back in the day I used git exclusively with git-svn at a place that was still stuck with SVN and I had a blast, while everyone else didn't. I just never had any of the problems they did.
I'm not entirely sure what pain people speak of with git. I found the transition very natural. And don't come talking to me about the "weird command syntax". Some of that was specifically to be compatible / "intuitive" / what they were used to for people coming from tools like SVN.
Sure you gotta learn about "the index", understand that everything is local and that you have an origin and local copy of all the labels (also sometimes called branches or tags) you can attach to commits. That's about it for the normal and regular use that someone would've had with SVN.
Well you can either have a viewpoint of "the current thing I use is fine because I'm used to the warts" or "it's not fine because other things exist".
It can't be that SVN is bad and git is better but also that git is fine even though jj is better.
Except that it has to first be true that jj is better ;)
You start out the article with hate for git without explaining what you actually don't like, then here on HN say "I don't hate git". A command called `fuckgit`? Because you need to re-clone? What are the things you commonly do that require this? I've never encountered it. Maybe you're just too advanced a user for git and jj really is better for you. But for us lowly regular users I really do not see an issue.
Some of the benefits you tout, like "editing a commit and you don't need to commit it yourself"? I'm sorry but I want to be the one in control here. I am the one that says "I'm done here, yes this is the new version of the commit I'm comfortable with". I've specifically forbid Claude to add, commit, push etc. for example.
It also breaks your "you need to stash" argument. I don't stash. I just commit if I have something WIP that needs saving while I work on some other emergency. There's no reason not to just commit. In fact I do that all the time to checkpoint work and I amend commits all the time. It's my standard commit command actually `git commit -a --amend`.
Automatic "oplog" of everything Claude did, IDE style: sure, maybe. Though I've yet to see that need arise in practice. Just because I have Claude et. al. now, I don't believe changes should be any bigger than they used to. Nor should my "commit early, commit often, push later" practice change.
> You start out the article with hate for git without explaining what you actually don't like
I start out the article saying I never understood git, and why does it matter what I don't like? That would only matter if I were trying to say that git is bad, but I'm not making a comparison. I just think jj is better-designed, and that you should try it.
> Some of the benefits you tout, like "editing a commit and you don't need to commit it yourself"?
I never said that's a benefit, I just said that's something jj does differently. I `jj commit` when I'm done with some work anyway.
> It also breaks your "you need to stash" argument. I don't stash. I just commit if I have something WIP that needs saving while I work on some other emergency.
In that case, you'll like jj, as it handles all that for you.
Your comment is coming off as a bit defensive, I didn't write my article to attack git. If you like git, keep using it, I prefer jj and I think other people will too. It's hard to get started with because its workflow is different from what we're used to, so I wrote the tutorial to help.
2 replies →