Down the line when you go to reintegrate/remerge the branches between the original branch and the cherry picked branch, git doesn't see the same commit/cha

Down the line when you go to reintegrate/remerge the branches between the original branch and the cherry picked branch, git doesn't see the same commit/change and its merge can (in my experience, will) see conflicts in the exact same change made in different contexts. Finally I see some common ground: by tracking changes separately to commits, users won't see merge conflicts when the commits get moved. Sadly, git also recognises this on the user's behalf, so likely your experience was due to some other delightful quirk of the git UI. edit: I'd also recommend not calling trees 'tree snapshots', because that will confuse people familiar with trees. Same for 'cherry-picking a commit', since from your description darcs seems to use 'cherry-picking' to mean 'fetch a set of changes from someone else', which maps to 'fetch a branch' in git-land. 'git cherry-pick' means, 'copy a single change from one local branch to another', so has almost no overlap.