Pijul is a free and open source (GPL2) distributed version control system. Its distinctive feature is to be based on a theory of patches, while still being fast and scalable. This makes it easy to learn and use, without any compromise on power or features.
Pijul is the first distributed version control system to be based on a sound mathematical theory of changes. It is inspired by Darcs, but aims at solving the soundness and perfor>mance issues of Darcs.
Pijul has a number of features that allow it to scale to very large repositories and fast-paced workflows. In particular, change commutation means that changes written independently can be applied in any order, without changing the result. This property simplifies workflows, allowing Pijul to:
- clone sub-parts of repositories
- solve conflicts reliably
- easily combine different versions.
The main difference between Pijul and Git (and related systems) is that Pijul stores changes (or patches), whereas Git deals only with snapshots (or versions).
It is unfortunately developing very slowly and it is impossible to interact with git repos… which nowadays is basically every repo:-(
Take a look at jj. It is not as ambitious, but develops faster and you can use it with any git repository out there (as long as it does not need git submodules that is).
It’s hard to understand what exactly will change for me if I used pijul vs git. What will be noticeably different?
I can’t speak for everyday workflow (having discovered this project less than a week ago), but rebase being unnecessary and cherry-pick not creating duplicate commits seem like the most notable advantages to me.
