Anyone using jj to manage dotfiles with YADM?

[ian-h-chamberlain]

Hi, I've started using jj with some more typical workflows on some existing projects (i.e. colocated repos) and it's been pretty nice so far! I was thinking some of the features (first-class conflicts, powerful mix-and-match, automatic tracking) would be really nice for managing my dotfiles repo, but so far I haven't been able to figure out how to set it up.

I have used yadm to manage my dotfiles for a while, which as I understand it basically works as a simple wrapper around git, with a few things that make it a lot more manageable to use than plain git:

• exports GIT_WORK_TREE="$HOME", all git operations are relative to the home dir
• exports GIT_DIR="$HOME/.local/share/yadm/repo.git" to hide the git repo "out of sight"
• Ignores untracked files by default, to skip enumerating things like ~/.cache etc.

yadm enter is also a nice little wrapper command which (generally speaking) sets these environment vars to allow any command that works with git to work with yadm as well, e.g. Git GUIs and things like that which use the git CLI for their underlying operations.

So the core of my question — is it possible to use jj in a setup like this? From what I can gather, GIT_DIR and GIT_WORK_TREE are maybe partially supported? e.g. I found #3377 and #6437 so I am not sure exactly how well-supported these vars are.

I tried to yadm enter jj git init and I found it basically just created a brand new git repo at ~/.git (seemingly ignoring GIT_DIR).
Then I tried following some of the "manual" steps listed in https://www.jj-vcs.dev/latest/git-compatibility/#converting-a-workspace-into-a-colocated-workspace to force–set the path of the repo.git dir, but ran into this:

Internal error: Failed to check out a commit
Caused by:
1: Failed to edit commit
2: Current working-copy commit not found
3: Object edfe7b99288f439da85862dd5a03cc7d883b66a9 of type commit not found
4: An object with id edfe7b99288f439da85862dd5a03cc7d883b66a9 could not be found

And this object indeed does not appear to exist in my yadm repo, so I'm guessing it's some kind of stale state that I would need to manually fix up.

So, to sum up, does anyone have tips or ideas of how to accomplish this (if it's even possible with current jj)? Am I crazy for even attempting this? Thanks in advance!