Then, at least for VCS, there are Darcs and Pijul, which use a theory of patches. So Pijul manages to have lossless merges by actually storing a directed graph

Then, at least for VCS, there are Darcs and Pijul, which use a theory of patches. So Pijul manages to have lossless merges by actually storing a directed graph (though of course, you will still need to decide how to flatten that into a displayed file) : https://jneem.github.io/pijul/ https://jneem.github.io/pijul/ And because it uses more information about the history, it is able to do smarter merges (if I am not mistaken, even compared to the OP ?) : https://tahoe-lafs.org/~zooko/badmerge/simple.html https://tahoe-lafs.org/~zooko/badmerge/simple.html https://pijul.org/faq https://pijul.org/faq