The correct way to think about snapshots and diffs when it comes to cherry-picking and rebasing is to realise that diffs are always derived from snapshots. I.e.

The correct way to think about snapshots and diffs when it comes to cherry-picking and rebasing is to realise that diffs are always derived from snapshots. I.e. the fundamental data-structure is the snapshot and from those we can build diffs. Those diffs are necessary to implement cherry-picking and rebasing but it's also possible to imagine an implementation git that has those features missing. It would still fundamentally work in the same way - it would just be slightly less useful. Edit: If you think this is just splitting hairs, I encourage you to look at the differences between git and pijul which is a VCS where the fundamental building block is diffs: https://pijul.com/ https://pijul.com/