It would be certainly be possible to reimplement git using only patches, showing that Pijul cannot be worse than git.
However, it would not be possible to implement a patch-based system (Pijul/darcs) based on git.
- One example is cherry-picking: in git, when you are on some branch A, and cherry-pick from another branch B, after the cherry-picking is done, if you try to cherry-pick from B again, you'll get conflicts. In Pijul and darcs, that comes for free.
Let's not judge so quickly and surely. There are still many things we don't know, and we have heard a story from him that makes sense, and I find plausible.
What if he really is mostly innocent? More importantly, Dash app is still great, probably the best for documentation browsing, and now iOS counterpart is restored in some way. Isn't it a great move from his side, considering the circumstances? Shouldn't we celebrate his efforts instead of blaming him?
However, it would not be possible to implement a patch-based system (Pijul/darcs) based on git.
- One example is cherry-picking: in git, when you are on some branch A, and cherry-pick from another branch B, after the cherry-picking is done, if you try to cherry-pick from B again, you'll get conflicts. In Pijul and darcs, that comes for free.
- Another example is merge: merge between commits is provably wrong (https://tahoe-lafs.org/~zooko/badmerge/simple.html). With patches, this cannot happen.