this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Programming
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It being objectively better then SVN or CVS doesn't mean that it's the best we can do. Git has all sorts of non-ideal behaviors that other VCS's don't. Pijul's data structure for instance is inherently different from git and it can't be retrofitted on top. Making tooling only support git effectively kills off any potential competitors that could be superior to git.
One example is pijul specifically let's you get away from the idea that moving commits between branches changes their identity, because pijul builds a tree of diffs. If two subtrees of diffs are distinct, they can always be applied without changing identity of those diffs. This means "cherry picking" a commit and then merging a commit doesn't effectively merge that commit twice resulting in a merge conflict.
That's one example how one VCS can be better.
What if we just upgrade git to have those features instead of reinventing the wheel?
The data model there is fundamentally different. That would break how git would work because operations that worked one way before would now no longer work that way. You'd functionally have rewritten and mapped all the old functionality to new functionality with subtle differences, but at that point is it even git? You have a wrapper with similar but subtly different commands and that's it. It's like saying "instead of reinventing functionality by building both ext4 and btrfs, why don't we just improve ext4"?
The two are practically entirely different.