Subject: Re: Gerrit, GitButler, and Jujutsu projects collaborating on change-id commit footer

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2025 07:27:50 -0700

Martin von Zweigbergk <[email-masked]> writes:

>> A set of individual commits that share the same "change ID" is,
>> unlike reflog entries which is an ordered set of tip of topics, not
>> inherently ordered.  This is inevitable in the distributed world
>> where many people can simultaneously work on improving a single
>> "change" in many different ways, but making it difficult if not
>> impossible to see how things evolved, simply because you first need
>> to figure out the order of these commits that share the same "change
>> ID".  Some may be independently evolved from the same ancestor
>> iteration.  Some may be repeatedly worked on on a single strand of
>> pearls (much like how development recorded in reflog entries of a
>> single branch in a single user set-up goes).  I guess you would need
>> a way to record the predecessor vs successor relationship of various
>> commits that share the same "change ID", much like commits form DAG
>> to represent ancestor vs descendant relationship.
>
> That is correct. The change ID should be sufficient for handling
> simple distributed cases involving a single remote but it's not a full
> replacement for something like Mercurial's Changeset Evolution [1].

Just a random thought.  We could very easily replace "change ID"
with a concept of predecessor-successor commits.

Just like we can represent parents-children NxM transitive relation
only with 0 or more "parent" commit object headers, we can record
zero or more "predecessor" trailer in the commit log.

 (1) a commit with no "predecessor" is like "root commit" in the
     commit history topology.  It is a brand new change that took
     inspiration from nobody else and that is not a polished form of
     any other existing commit.

 (2) a commit created as a refinement for one or more existing
     commits record each of them as "predecessor" to it.  Having
     more than one of them is like a "merge commit" in the commit
     history topology and represents that two patches were squashed
     into one.

 (3) Splitting an originally large change into multiple changes can
     be represented the same way.  They share the same commit as
     their "predecessor".  Perhaps you have originally two-commit
     series, A and B, and split them differently in such a way that
     C has half of a and D has the rest of A plus B.  In which case,
     C has A as its predecessor while D has both A and B as its
     predecessor.

 (4) Just like we can use auxiliary data structures like bitmaps to
     figure out reachability without following all the links in the
     commit history topology, we should be able to learn how a new
     change was born, and trace how it evolved into newer iteration
     of the moral equivalent of the change, possibly as a series
     with mutiple commits, using auxiliary data structure, which
     would represent predecessor-successor NxM transitive relation
     in a similar way in a form that is efficient to access.

Something like this should allow us avoid relying on "change ID"s
that can collide elsewhere in the world without having a central
authority to assign them.