It's actually even worse than that. Even plain text files can cause problems. You make a change to a file over here, then you delete the file over there. What should be the result of the merge? There are an infinite number of such screw cases because the "right answer" depends on the semantics of the data. For example: you add a line to a file over here, then you add the same line to the same file in the same location over there. What should be the result of the merge? Should you end up with one extra line or two? What if one line has an extra trailing space? What if it was an extra leading space and the file contains Python code?
But don't these problems exist regardless of your approach? Git and it's way of handling trees of old commits is a decent place to start. It clearly isn't a final solution, but building on top of it seems like a worthwhile direction, at least to me.
> But don't these problems exist regardless of your approach?
Yes, of course. That was exactly the point I was trying to make: it's a fundamentally hard problem.
> Git and it's way of handling trees of old commits is a decent place to start. It clearly isn't a final solution, but building on top of it seems like a worthwhile direction, at least to me.
That depends on what problem you want to solve. If you want to solve the general data-storage-in-the-cloud problem, then Git is fundamentally flawed because 1) one of the inescapable aspects of the problem is that the solution depends on the semantics of the data and 2) Git by design knows nothing about the semantics of the data.
