Exploring the innovative Pijul version management system
The Wild Bird
Image © starush, 123RF.com
What comes after Git? The Pijul developers think they know the answer. The Pijul version control system blends old ideas in a smart new way. Will it be enough to kick off a post-Git era?
The groove-billed ani, which is native to Mexico, is a bird that builds its nests communally in small groups. Although these cute little birds have a tongue twister of a name in English, the Mexicans simply call them Pijuls. Pijul is also the name of a relatively new version control system created by Pierre-Étienne Meunier and Florent Becker [1]. Like the groove-billed ani, the Pijul version control system focuses on distributed teamwork. Pijul is also extremely fast and easy to use, and it does away with some of the problems that haunt Git users. At least that's the full-bodied promise of the makers.
At first glance, working with Pijul actually seems surprisingly simple: After you have registered all files with the version management system by typing pijul add *, you communicate every change to the tool by typing pijul record. And that's it. Unlike Git, there is no confusing staging area, and the commands are far leaner than Git commands.
Pijul uses the same distributed approach: Each team member has a local repository in which the version management system stores all changes made by the local author. Exchanging data between team members is also a breeze with Pijul. If programmer Alice wants to adopt a bugfix from her colleague Bob, she types pijul pull to pull the code change into her own copy. Even if Bob has made more changes in the meantime, Alice can easily cherry pick the bugfix with pijul pull; an equivalent to this kind of cherry picking can require many steps in Git.
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