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Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

Patch based version control like Pijul can deal with merges better than snapshot based systems like Git.

E.g. if you merge two branches with the same patches but in different order, but the file contents are the same at the end, git will need to you to manually address the merges for each patch. In a patch based system, there is no conflict if two patches can be reordered with the same final result.

I have not used Pijul a lot, but I did use Darcs before Git. Some of the merges felt like magic.

Git is fine but it can get messy with complex branching and merging strategies. Patch based systems are intended to improve that.

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> E.g. if you merge two branches with the same patches but in different order, but the file contents are the same at the end, git will need to you to manually address the merges for each patch.

That's not really true - only in the case where the changes are ambiguous.

I've worked on very hairy Git repos and haven't really felt blocked, even when some crazy merge conflicts happened.

Apropos of nothing, I notice that your comment is post number 30 000 000 on Hacker News. Congratulations, I guess?

I had the same thought. Though, it appears that post numbers stopped being interesting by 10M: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10000000

I was surprised that the post numbers appear to be sequential, and that there would be ~30M. Over 15 years of HN, that's ~5K posts/day, and about 200 new posts/hour. Things accrue. I'd estimate that HN is well north of 300K readers/day ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581

edit - it looks like each comment has its own item id. So posts are both new items and comments. That makes more sense to me in terms of scale.

Close to 9 years for the first 10M from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10000000

About 4 years for the next 10M from there to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000000

Approx. 2.5 years for the 10M after that to the current total number of posts and comments we have today.

That's pretty interesting to me.

I wonder if growth will continue, and for how long HN will be able to sustain its excellent signal to noise ratio.

Also, here are some other neat item ids:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11111111

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22222222

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23456789

In any case, the answer to your question is that Pijul can solve certain kinds of merges automatically when Git gives you a conflict that needs manual intervention.

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