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docs: Add a Jujutsu from first principles doc.
This document is WIP. This came up recently in Discord as a explanation was requested without referencing Git, which all our other documents do.
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# Jujutsu from first principles (without Git) | ||
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## Preface | ||
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Why does Jujutsu exist and which problems does it solve? This document tries to | ||
answer both of these questions while expanding on the design in a user-friendly | ||
way. | ||
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At its core Jujutsu is [Version Control System][vcs] which scales to huge | ||
repositories at [Google scale][billion-lines]. Many design choices are | ||
influenced by the concurrent commits happening in Googles Monorepo, as there | ||
are always multiple people working on the same file(s) at the same time. | ||
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## Core Tenets | ||
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Jujutsu's core tenets are: | ||
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* User-friendliness: Making the working copy a commit is simpler. This is | ||
how the project started. | ||
* The "repository", so the commit graph is the source of truth. The working | ||
copy is just one way of editing commits. | ||
* All operations must be able to scale to Google-scale repos (lots of commits | ||
, lots of files): Laziness is important, must avoid accessing data | ||
unnecessarily. | ||
* Having as few states as possible. | ||
* Make it incredibily hard to lose work in your repository. | ||
* Allow concurrent edits on any commit, pending or finished. | ||
* Make a "stacked diffs" workflow as easy as possible. | ||
* Git-interop: Git is everywhere. We need to have good interop to be adapted. | ||
* Pluggable storage: Must be easy to integrate with different commit storage, | ||
virtual file systems and more. | ||
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## Base design | ||
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The initial base design is to be a conceptually simpler Mercurial, as | ||
automatically snapshotting the working copy simplifies the UX of the | ||
command-line interface by a huge amount and avoids many bad states. | ||
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By also choosing to operate by default on the history of the repository ( | ||
just called the "the Graph" from now on) instead of files, all history | ||
modifying commands can be done at any point. This is a major improvement on | ||
other version control systems as they need to re-apply a single patch on each | ||
new ancestor before finishing the Graph rewrite. Since the Graph can be changed | ||
at any point, the working copy cannot contain any state depending on it, thus | ||
we have the working-copy commit, which just is another commit from the Graph's | ||
point of view. | ||
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### Change-IDs and Changes | ||
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Since Jujutsu is oriented around a "stacked diffs" kind of workflow, which | ||
primarily work on individually versiond patch sets, some kind of container is | ||
needed, this is what a Change is. They are provided with a unique id to address | ||
them easily. | ||
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TODO: expand on change-ids and "working on the graph/repo" instead of a commit | ||
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[billion-lines]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7*TkUbdqE&t=327s | ||
[vcs]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control |
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