Roughly, patch(1) has about the same relation to Pijul as RCS has to git. I don't think useful conclusions can be drawn from that experience, basically. As you

Roughly, patch(1) has about the same relation to Pijul as RCS has to git. I don't think useful conclusions can be drawn from that experience, basically. As you say, they're duals: but the actual changes need to be modeled as patches to do anything non-trivial with a snapshot. One can build a linear history as a series of snapshots, but applying them to some other timeline can be done with a patch, or with? Nope, it's just patches. My intuition is that architecting the VCS as patches, and making snapshots an interface question, will work better than the other way around. But Pijul is not yet advanced enough in UX terms to really cash out on that guess.