The point, as per the article mentioned in the parent comment, is to talk about merging patches rather than snapshots. This allows you to force certain nice pro

The point, as per the article mentioned in the parent comment, is to talk about merging patches rather than snapshots. This allows you to force certain nice properties of merges like associativity. Sometimes you need information about deleted things in your patch to be able to merge correctly though I don’t have an example from the top of my head