I used VisualAge's Envy for 3 years while working in a Smalltalk project. Envy does versioning of classes and methods, and you can programmatically access to t

I used VisualAge's Envy for 3 years while working in a Smalltalk project. Envy does versioning of classes and methods, and you can programmatically access to the model. It allowed us to build tools around the VCS. For example, we had tools to merge multiple feature branches and resolve conflicts automatically. We also used the same tools to produce migration scripts for our database (GemStone). That was 18yrs ago! and today sounds irreal. You can build tools on top of git, but the versioning “unit” gets in the way. (e.g imagine the possibility to encode refactorings in your change history and reapply or rollback them). I’m not trying to criticize git. I think it is the best file based DVCS. My point is that many dev tools that we use today are extremely rudimentary, because the lack of good abstractions. And I don’t think that git provides a good model to build those abstractions on top of it.