People using git think that commits are patches. But that isn’t how git works. Git sometimes tries to let you treat a commit like the diff between it and it’s p

People using git think that commits are patches. But that isn’t how git works. Git sometimes tries to let you treat a commit like the diff between it and it’s parent and lets you try to rewrite history but these are really making new commits with new ids and this confuses people. In pijul, the objects you interact with actually are diffs (aka patches) and then snapshots are well-formed sets of patches. Here, well-formed means that if a patch is in the set then so are it’s dependencies (these dependencies aren’t like parent commits in git, they’re more like you need to add line 3 before you can delete it). So removing or modifying a patch in a branch isn’t a horrific interactive rebase operation anymore. When you move a patch in pijul it doesn’t affect any of the patches written before or after it (unless they depend on it). When you “move a patch” in git you rewrite the history and create new commits, so if I was talking about a commit (id) before the move, I would be talking about some dangling commit after the move and would need to update my id to the corresponding new post-move commit.