Pijul, a distributed version control system emphasizing patches rather than commits, could emerge as a potential challenger to Git and Subversion.
Snapshot-based systems like Git or Mercurial are typically fast, but they're hard to use for more than simple operations. On the other hand, patch-based systems like Darcs are simple to use, but slow.
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Pijul represents data in a more general manner than snapshot-based systems, allowing for a patch-based interface. "In short: [Git and Subversion's] main concept is commits, which are states of a project at a given point in time," Pijul co-developer Pierre-Etienne Meunier said. "Ours is patches, which changes to the state of a project."
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