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.
Thanks for that link, that finally helped me understand the real benefit of the patch model, this quote in particular:
> The difference between what svn does and what darcs does here is, contrary to popular belief, not that darcs makes a better or luckier guess as to where the line from c1 should go, but that darcs uses information that svn does not use -- namely the information contained in b1 -- to learn that the location has moved and precisely to where it has moved.
Darcs/Pijul understand which lines a patch is interested in, and if those lines get moved around in another branch, the patch "follows" them to the right place, rather than just finding/applying the shortest possible diff.
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.