Somehow ignorant(?) question about jujutsu

[a-man-called-q]

Hey, I stumbled to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV0JzI8IcCY when I was opening youtube. jj seems interesting. However, I have questions about jj:

• Is jj a new DVCS like git but can be used fully independent without git or jj is a git-related VCS(?) that makes git operation easier and must have git as dependency (because lots of people use git as the data storage for jj)?
• Does jj have some kind of auth implemented? If so, where can I find the docs? or if not, does jj have "hooks" like git?

Sorry if this sounds too shallow, I only use git for daily usage and "just enough" to get by.

[joyously]

Please read the README, where it says

Jujutsu is unlike most other systems, because internally it abstracts the user interface and version control algorithms from the storage systems used to serve your content. This allows it to serve as a VCS with many possible physical backends

and

Today, we use Git repositories as a storage layer to serve and track content

For auth, do you mean commit signing? Read about that on the Settings page.

For hooks, there are none yet, but issues are open, like #3577.

[a-man-called-q]

@joyously thanks for the response

Please read the README, where it says

Jujutsu is unlike most other systems, because internally it abstracts the user interface and version control algorithms from the storage systems used to serve your content. This allows it to serve as a VCS with many possible physical backends

and

Today, we use Git repositories as a storage layer to serve and track content

Yes I read that before I asked here, sorry for not mentioning before. It's because of This allows it to serve as a VCS with many possible physical backends I became confused 😄

For auth, do you mean commit signing? Read about that on the Settings page.

No, I mean permission to access the repo. like RBAC or something simpler.

For hooks, there are none yet, but issues are open, like #3577.

Thanks !

[martinvonz]

• Is jj a new DVCS like git but can be used fully independent without git

Yes, it's independent of Git. We custom storage backends and commands at Google. Git is not involved there. There's a minute of two towards the end of my demo at Git Merge 2024 where I showed that it works and looks pretty much like regular jj on Git.

Well, jj is not necessarily a distributed VCS like Git. It depends on the storage backends. The storage backends at Google store all the data in a central database.

or jj is a git-related VCS(?) that makes git operation easier and must have git as dependency (because lots of people use git as the data storage for jj)?

Most of jj is agnostic of the storage backend implementation. The jj git commands add some interop specifically for Git, however. We have jj piper commands at Google for interop without internal VCS (which is called Piper).

• Does jj have some kind of auth implemented? If so, where can I find the docs? or if not, does jj have "hooks" like git?

No, it depends on the forge-specific integration. For Git, we currently use libgit2 with support for https and ssh (currently libssh2). At Google, we use gRPC with Google-specific authentication.

[a-man-called-q]

Well, jj is not necessarily a distributed VCS like Git. It depends on the storage backends. The storage backends at Google store all the data in a central database.

Can jj works alone ? From your statement it seems like jj must have somekind of storage backend that isn't included with jj although I saw a command like jj init in the documentation.

[ilyagr]

The git backend is built-in and compiled into the jj binary. jj currently is quite self-sufficient.

We might add an option to shell out to a git binary in the future, but it'd be an option, and it doesn't exist yet.

[a-man-called-q]

Thanks for the explanations

[a-man-called-q]

@ilyagr @martinvonz @joyously I'm going to close the discussion. Thanks for the responses. I'll test drive jj for a while.