git history reword ~= jj describe
git history split ~= jj split
Surely that isn't true, otherwise it would be completely unusable for auditing.
Some comments here are confusing the issue by saying ‘commit’ when they mean ‘change’ in the jj sense.
Re the grandparent comment, `jj describe` provides a change description, analogous to `git commit --amend --edit` in git terms.
But ... is it really that different from git? You can always rewrite history in git, correct?
‘jj describe’ lets you add a message to a commit as it’s not there by default.
The point is, ergonomics matter. Rebase is not ergonomic for splitting commits.
The point is this is perhaps true for you but most definitely not for others. there’s a Jevon’s paradox-like mechanic at play here which you can’t see if your axiom is ‘I don’t need this.’
It's very widely remarked that the Git CLI is pretty miserable, and as soon as a better (so I hear) alternative comes along they suddenly realise and start improving it... This happens all the time in software.
Some software has crap UX or missing obvious features (e.g. comments in package.json). People try and improve it but are rebuffed because the maintainers claim it's fine as it is. Effort goes elsewhere to a competitor project which starts to attract users. Maintains of the original project have a sudden and coincidental change of heart!
This command is implemented by just one single (but prolific) contributor. His own idea.
You hear some very vocal critics expressing hyperbolic personal opinions on the topic, but I find that in the majority of the cases the opinions aren't objective or grounded on reality. It's just people whining.
The litmus test is asking what is the worst example of this "pretty miserable" CLI they talk about. More often than not it's just baseless nitpicking. I recommend you give the litmus test a try to see how far this myth flies.
There's a lot of arguments that still seem to think of the git CLI before a lot of the porcelain projects started merging into git upstream. There's a lot of people that mostly only learned the plumbing tools and don't care for the porcelain projects. It certainly doesn't help that much of the best porcelain still isn't the default experience. You have to remember `git rebase -i` for the best porcelain rebase experience. You have to remember `git add -p` for the best porcelain add experience. (This article even indirectly hints at the silliness that the best interactive `git add` is `-p` for "pinteractive" because `-i` "interactive" was already taken by a weaker one.)
That said, a lot of the porcelain is there today to take advantage of. Git has improved significantly from its plumbing-first worst CLIs. `git checkout` finally got split into `git switch` and `git restore` and both of those are great. (And no longer marked "experimental", they are official daily-use approved porcelain now.)
That's also sort of the highlight of this post that a lot of the porcelain continues to improve. The UX of the git CLI isn't etched in stone. New, better commands are possible, and indeed are getting built by smart people, some of who even care about UX for themselves and their fellow developers. Git is no longer the rush project it once was. Git no longer sees itself as "plumbing-first" at the expense of the "porcelain".
It will just maybe take a while for more of the elephants to forget the past horror stories and befuddlement.
1. The way you delete things is just incomprehensibly inconsistent.
2. Naming of things is sometimes massively more confusing than it should be. Index? Why not "draft"? Ours/theirs presume some kind of ownership that doesn't exist, and they flip around depending on what command you're doing. To be fair a lot of the naming is decent.
3. The messages the CLI prints are unnecessarily obscure. They presume expertise without being friendly. For example look at the error you get from a submodule update where the commit can't be found. Does it say "Error: submodule points to <commit> but that commit was not found on the remote. Was it pushed?". No it does not. (I can't remember the exact message but I remember thinking how awful it was.)
I don't think these claims have merit, for the most part. More often than not, people just don't take any time to learn git, then get on a soapbox about it.
If you think these commands are worthwhile, by all means use them. I happen to think git rebase is all you need. Giving people crutches to avoid using it just delays their enlightenment. But not everyone reaches enlightenment, it's true.
I don't think jj adds anything compelling over git either. But different strokes for different folks...
That is true. However those same people that struggled for years with git are able to pick up jj and be very productive with no issue whatsoever, in a matter of days. So either:
1. jj is a lot more intuitive out of the box
2. or jj makes learning it fun, so more people do it
Whichever it may be, hopefully git can improve by learning from it and we all win. Don't you agree?
3. After years of refusing to learn git and making excuses for their hate, the goobers finally buckle down and read the manual for a tool that coincidentally does stuff a little different from git. They leap at the opportunity to further blame git for their difficulties rather than themselves.
If there is a way git can be made to appease these people without making it horrible, then we should try to do it. But I still think these people would be better served by buckling down for a few hours to learn git as it was designed, because it is designed very well.
These new config-based hooks are definitely a step down the road towards obsoleting the third-party hook managers. One of the things they are for is for managing scripts to support multiple hooks for the same event. The new config format supports multiple hooks for the same event natively. (Which also helps in stacking personal ones versus repository ones.)
The only thing missing is that the repository's .git/config isn't itself source controlled in that repository, so for now there would still be an "install step", but it's now a lot simpler of an "install step" with the install being "append .example-gitconfig into your .git/config" rather than "set X files to X different contents in .git/hooks/*" where X is the number of event hooks to be concerned about.
It does open the door further to if there should be a ".gitconfig" in the Repository working tree that can also contribute repository-wide shared config, what config it can or cannot contribute, and how you secure that as a reviewable opt-in (especially change notifications). But a smartly built secure UX there would be a massive improvement over, say, shell scripts in npm postinstall operations touching .git/hooks "for you" (which is how many of the current hook managers auto-install, as side effects in dependency installs).
(ETA: Though most "install scripts" now just use the very scriptable `git config` command and so just be `git config set --local hook.$name.$field $value` sequences, which is also a simpler improvement over previous ways to install and/or merge hooks files by hooks managers.)
By running the linters and any other checks on CI instead.
CI should also run all the checks but CI checks are not a replacement for local hooks. LFS and things like it can't be implemented as remote CI checks.
Why are we acting like a James Bond villain, slowly lowering the changes into the vat of sharks after we've left the room? I want the hooks. Can we talk about making that easy, assuming some people want them?
Because we want to be sure that the checks have passed, and that they have passed in a clean environment.
Contributors can, in addition, use git hooks, or run tests in watch mode, or use their IDE.
Also it's annoying to have slow git hooks if you commit often.
Automatically running arbitrary code from random repositories is a Really Bad Idea, so Git will almost certainly never auto-install pre-commit hooks. Just mention it in the README and run a checker in CI to confirm they are using it, it really isn't that difficult.
People wasting 2 minutes of their own time once during their first contribution because they didn't read the README is not that big of a deal. What's next, you want a script to automatically sign a project's legally-binding CLA on checkout?
We already know we're definitely going to run some of these. We know we want to maintain changes to these hooks. Can we stop pretending like we're not doing that? We get it. Some of these will be untrusted so let's design a system to handle that instead of not designing a system and deciding to be just short of as unsafe as possible.
Automation an uniformity increases safety. Human intervention increases human error. Its just a matter of actually finding a good solution to know what is trusted but instead we get "just set it up manually because its safer."
If one hates the round-trip he/she will adopt hooks quickly.
I was writing more in regards of hooks as "checks" for workflow/lints/etc.
LFS needs an install step and it needed to be brought into git itself to cut through all of the problems. Manually managing hooks is not sufficient.
No amount of "please don't fuck it up" in the readme is going to save you.
Even CI checks for what should and shouldn't look like an lfs stub is non-trivial. I don't think such a thing even exists today.
Signed git plugins and manifest or a canonical way to define hooks in repo that most tools can interface with and allow the user to automatically set up but asks to do so or really so much more.
I don't know why people get fixated on this as if 99.999% of what git pulls down isn't code you expect to run and there are systems in place to protect that.
It's still annoying for new contributors though because they might not know how to set up pre-commit (which was quite a pain until recently because it's written in Python).
All the push back to making this system good just ensures its as terrible as the nay-sayers fear.
Running linters on CI is an antipattern if there was ever one. That and configuring pipeline runs to fail for linting issues.
Sometimes some people just want to create their own problems. Configuring the editor solves most of the problems, and hooks add a failsafe. Once the code is committed, it should be immutable.
Can I pay you to run hooks on the work machine I own because it saves a lot of work on the share build machines? Can we talk about making that situation less error prone?
Why force git to be a build tool?
Just document how to execute the scripts/checks that will be used by ci. Provide a simple script in the repo that folks can intentionally execute.
You don't need to bring up bad ideas as if it precludes the existence of good ideas. Let's talk about good ways to solve these problems and improve the tool.
While I understand the security concerns, too, wouldn't this be solved by including a `trust` command like in direnv and mise? (I.e. have the user review the hooks before executing them for the first time.)
It will then handle git hooks on each commit via composer script by default (but can be omitted per commit).
I think there should probably be a way to specify canonical git configuration for things like hooks and LFS and all of that. It would be nice if when you clone, git prompts you to trust the remote config or to ask you to accept each new change as they come or fully reject them.
Having to scrape through the readme of every repo and then run arbitrary scripts doesn't seem like the most secure solution. When there's a canonical flow gitlab GitHub and all the tooling can support it and have proper permissions around it.
It's really disappointing how much lack of empathy there is when talking about new git features. Forget empathy. There's outright disdain for discussing alternative workflows.
I'm glad cloning a repo doesn't automatically install hooks since I strongly dislike them: I often use Git commands in the terminal but sometimes I use the VS Code UI to commit, and it's extremely frustrating when simply creating a commit runs for several seconds because of some pre-commit hook.
The per-repo config is in `.git/config`, so that can still not be checked into the repo itself, unless I'm missing something?
So not very useful at all...
I get the security implications, but there could be a checked in `$REPO/.githooks`, and a prompt asking to allow running those hooks , with an approval marker being stored inside `.git/`.
Obviously it still leaves the door open if there should be a `.githooks` or `.gitconfig` file in the committed worktree that can suggest changes to `.git/config` with fewer manual steps, but this first effort in minimizing the number of manual steps and simplifying those manual steps to a simpler merge is still quite useful.
Which is also before pointing out that the `git config` command is already quite scriptable as a simple merge tool. You could in theory replace a "hooks manager" install script with just a sequence of `git config set --local hook.$name.*` lines. You still have to figure out how to get the user to run that script just like installing any other hooks manager, but that's an easy script now to write.
Though looks like `git history split` won't yet replace my typical workflow:
$ git rebase -i // with e on commit in question
$ git reset HEAD~
$ git add -p
`git history reword` will be handy once I wire up a script to pipe the log of recent commits through fzf for interactive selection (not sure if it's just me, but I prefer interactive selection over any other form of reference to a git hash).
And I bet I'll get some use out of `git rebase --trailer`.
Only a few days ago, I was just looking for some way to automatically check (and fail) if there are inactive hooks when I try to commit. I already use `advice.ignoredhook`, but it's easy to miss the warning if you commit through VSCode, and possibly through other IDEs.
With this, I can just write a simple script to perform that check, and add it to my global config
I hate to be the worry wart, but I am worried folks are going to avoid `git rebase -i` even more now. It is such an excellent excellent UI in my opinion: it shows you the history of what is clearly, and let's you modify it as you please!
If you have anything else branching/referencing a commit after the reword commit that isn't part of the branch you are rebasing you now have all those references still pointing to the old commit and need to go through every one of them to fix them.
The git log -L change is nice to see as well. Anything that makes git more filterable gets my vote.
But what about local heads referred to only by a "soft" tag? Is their history rewritten, or is it left to refer to the old history?
That way you're still "blazingly-fast with your SOTA-LLM!!!" while also understanding why :)