It feels like roughly the issue is that git thinks in terms of snapshots whereas people often think in terms of patches. Darcs and pijul are version control sys

It feels like roughly the issue is that git thinks in terms of snapshots whereas people often think in terms of patches. Darcs and pijul are version control systems that try to have patches as the fundamental object you operate on instead of snapshots. In particular, there isn’t a rerere operation to change the base of a commit because patches don’t have bases in the same way. However if you’re reviewing code you probably do care about the base because changing the base may change the meaning of the branch and if eg some library function is renamed between when you write/approve a patch and when you merge it, the patch may no-longer be valid.