Two concepts but three terms: change, commit, revision

[xpe]

On behalf of future users everywhere, I request that JJ pick two canonical terms to correspond with the two concepts:

• commit == revision: the object in the backing Git data model
• change: how a commit evolves over time; not actually an object in the data model: the change ID is a property of a commit: this is the key to providing a stable identity when rewriting commits

I haven't been around long enough to know the backstory, but I can notice that it makes it harder to learn JJ.

See also

From Steve's JJ tutorial: Revisions (bold text added by me):

The term revision is sometimes used as well. "revision" is a synonym for "commit." It's a slightly more generic term.

The jj project is still working out which terminology is best, and so sometimes, you'll find things like this. In particular, there's a desire to turn these three concepts into only two, but it's not clear which word ends up being best, so for now, there's three of them.

Inspirations

• Ubiquitous Language

Anti-Inspirations

• Git has three terms for just one concept (yikes): index, cache, staging-area.
  • (One of my favorite things about JJ is how it adopts a simpler conceptual model than Git.)