Rename obslog (obsolescence log)

[Cretezy]

The obslog subcommand has a confusing name. It's derived from Mercurial's obsolescence markers, but does not reflect what it does (show other revisions of the same change-id) clearly.

More discussion: https://discord.com/channels/968932220549103686/969291218347524238/1201539793046208532

Potential ideas:

• jj changelog or if split into other subcommands, jj change. Overlap with the concept of a changelog
• jj evolution or jj evolutionlog
• jj rewritelog
• jj editlog

[joyously]

Maybe change the help text to use that phrase "show other revisions of the same change-id", since I couldn't determine what the command did from the help either.
Please don't use change, since it is both a verb and noun.
Maybe overview or rev-view or just view since without a -r you get @ which isn't that great usually.
Even though I think commands should be verbs, I think evolution is pretty good.
Does this concept affect all backends?

[Cretezy]

I've updated #3593 to include a change to the help text

[noahmayr]

I kind of like changelog but there have been previous discussions whether change / change id should be renamed to something else because that naming has also been confusing.
There's also revlog (could be confused for reflog though)

[chriskrycho]

Interesting thought on revlog—that “adjacency” to reflog might actually be a positive? Also, Jujutsu could totally have a did you mean? if you type jj reflog.

[martinvonz]

"Revlog" is also what Mercurial's main storage format is called (https://wiki.mercurial-scm.org/Revlog). Just FYI; I don't think that's much reason to avoid it.

[ilyagr]

I like jj rewritelog. jj evolutionlog could also work. It could have evolog as an alias.

For jj changelog, a user might expect that to convert repo history into a textual changelog for a release.

[Cretezy]

I too like jj rewritelog.

Maybe rewlog could be an alias too? jj reflog/jj revlog could show "Did you mean rewlog" as @chriskrycho mentioned.

[ilyagr]

I think rewlog looks too much like a typo for my taste. rewrlog is a bit better, but then I'd just go with rewritelog and rely on the fact that rewr<tab> should shell-expand to rewritelog.

[ilyagr]

(This discussion continues below, see #3592 (reply in thread) and @thoughtpolice 's comment that replies to)

[thoughtpolice]

My thinking is:

• I'd like us to avoid compound abbreviations (rewlog or obslog), because they suffer from the exact problem this discussion wants to solve. I would literally have no clue what rewlog meant.
• I'd like us to avoid compoud words because — and I know this is trite — they look really bad and ugly! rewritelog is just ugly for instance. (They do this in Mercurial but I think there's a related issue at play which is that that hg doesn't have subcommands IIRC, so they have to have hg thingcmd rather than hg thing cmd.)
• I think a single, provocative and unique name is good

So from that point of view, I actually quite like the term evolution.

[noahmayr]

we could also use (show|view|log) predecessors which is what it's called internally (yes, long word but nothing tab completion can't solve)

[ilyagr]

I think evolution is a good idea, it's better than evolutionlog. jj change evolution would be clearer, but we already do jj split instead of jj change split and so on.

I prefer evolution to ancestry or predecessors, because these make me think of a change's parents, and that usually refers to the commit graph.

I don't actually find rewritelog ugly, but maybe I'm held hostage by compound words. Generally, I think compound words should be avoided when possible, but not when it makes things less clear. (In this case, it's arguable whether rewritelog is clearer for most people. It makes sense to me, and I still like it, but I'm happy with evolution).

[chriskrycho]

jj evolution -r <id> seems excellent to me, for whatever that’s worth. I agree with everyone who dislikes compound-word commands, and “evolution” was (as I noted on the Discord discussion that spawned this) the first word that came to mind for me for describing what is going on with a change. If you wanted to get a little bit cute (…but in a good way, IMO), you could do jj evolution --of <id>, with --of as an alias for -r/--revision. 😅

[yuja]

"evolution" sounds like a command namespace (i.e. jj evolution <verb>), but I don't have a strong feeling.

[ilyagr]

If we ever have other commands to put in that namespace, we could rename jj evolution to jj evolution log or jj evolve log.