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Comment by fosterfriends | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the argument laid out here. Series of small diffs with versions is a fantastic clean model.

When creating Graphite on top of GitHub, we chose to only support rebase model (despite the chaos that creates in GitHub timeline events). We also added “versions” support, which wasn’t too hard because GitHub holds on to old commits even if you force push over them.

A lot of what we try to build is the exact ideas this author is championing, in a way that’s compatible on top of GitHub. My dream is us and others help usher Eng back towards the patterns Phabricator and Gerrit helped start :)

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We strongly considered Graphite as an alternative to Gerrit at my job that I mentioned at the start of this post (which I am no longer at, actually) because it does look like an absolutely excellent product, I will admit. You should all be proud of a smart design and smart set of tools.

But there's a really really really really really really big problem. Me and the other main engineer on our team used a custom frontend to Git called Jujutsu[1] for all development. Jujutsu is about 1000x better than Git. So that's nice. (I'm also one of the developers, so I'm not going to abandon it anytime soon.)

But gt, the graphite client, is not open source. I have no idea how to make them work together. I have no idea how to extend Jujutsu to handle Graphite stacks, because I don't even think there's an API to handle any of this.

I even wrote a Gerrit integration for Jujutsu because JJ works so well at stacking, and Gerrit + Jujutsu is absolutely a force to be reckoned with IMO, even if the UX isn't as nice as Graphite's. (I'm happy to show the people at Graphite why that is, too, if anyone has time or is interested, but I suspect you could all grasp Jujutsu quite easily :)

Please! Make gt open source and make it possible for third parties to make and update stacks. This isn't just useful for jj but all kinds of automation that wants to contribute patches -- imagine tools like Google's internal "Code Review ML models" for Critique that might recommend you rename a variable based on context. They will suggest the fix for you or even apply it! You can get around some of those workflows with "Incorporate suggested edits" which is great on Gerrit (and Graphite?), but not all of them.

[1] https://github.com/martinvonz/jj

We (Graphite) love Jujutsu – comes up in conversation all the time here.

A prior version of the CLI is open source, the core data model (using git refs to store some extra data about what a branch's parent is) is still the same. https://github.com/withgraphite/graphite-cli

We've talked about supporting other clients, but don't currently have the bandwidth to build something like that – definitely something I am personally passionate about making sure happens at some point.

I think the cli repo went private a while ago.

If you are looking for an open source stacked PRs CLI, you can look into av CLI (https://github.com/aviator-co/av). Unfortunately this also only works with GitHub, but it should be possible to add support for any Git-based platform.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Aviator who supports the av CLI. It's a free tool to manage stacked PRs.

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