Is there a way to find a workspace?

[landtuna]

It seems that jj workspace list doesn't tell you where a workspace is located. Is there a way to find out this information? I resorted to find ~ -name repo -type f.

[martinvonz]

No, there is no way. It's that way by design because the workspaces may live somewhere that the repo doesn't even know about, like on a USB stick. At Google, where repos are stored in a central database, there can still be workspaces on a user's local machine.

[landtuna]

Thanks!

[arxanas]

Is that a good OSS design?

• Realistically I'd probably lose my workspaces just like in the original post.
• It sounds like it'll make it hard for automation to programmatically manage workspaces.

Maybe an incrementally-better design is to mark workspaces as locally-accessible or not?

• Git also has the same issue where a worktree may reside on a networked filesystem, etc. so you have to lock it so that prune doesn't think it's missing and try to clean it up.
  • That is, it knows about and accommodates non-local workspaces in the design, but doesn't recognize them as a top-level concept.
• It would be nice to potentially mark workspaces as "programmatically-managed" as well, although that's a different issue.
• It's true that the management of bidirectional awareness of Git worktrees is annoying, unlike jj which I assume is unidirectional for now.
  • In Git, if you move a worktree without running the appropriate command, it'll get confused and you'll have to remediate.

I guess I could see unidirectionally-linked workspaces as a more tractable design, though.

• It might not be so bad to have users and tooling establish their own conventions for workspace location, if the alternative is the mess of administrative overhead of git worktree.

[martinvonz]

Is it much more likely that people forgetting where their additional workspaces are than forgetting where their main workspace is? Is it that people create temporary workspaces in /tmp/ or something?

I don't mind adding some non-authoritative information about where workspaces may possibly be found.

[landtuna]

Yes, this is how I ended up in the situation. I make temporary workspaces sometimes when I'm doing two things at once. And then quite a while later I'll run jj workspace list and wonder what those random workspaces were. Every time, there's nothing important there, but I still want to check if maybe I left anything in the temporary workspace before I run jj workspace forget. (Though I guess only non-tracked files could be lying around in them.)

[martinvonz]

FYI, jj workspace forget doesn't actually delete any files, so maybe part of the answer is that we should make it possible to add back an existing workspace (in case you find a workspace later). I think we have a TODO somewhere about that.