Okay, that I can agree with. I just think it is misleading to say they are based on change lists since changelists can be derived but are not actually stored.

Okay, that I can agree with. I just think it is misleading to say they are based on change lists since changelists can be derived but are not actually stored. (And in the case of git at least, the changes you derive may not be changes that a human made, per se (in other words, those changes are the output of rebase.))