CRDTs should be able to give you better merge and rebase behaviour. They essentially make rebase and merge commits the same thing - just different views on a commit, and potentially different ways to present the conflict. CRDTs also behave better when commits get merged multiple times in complex graphs - you don’t run into the problem of commits conflicting with themselves.

You should also be able to roll back a single commit or chain of commits in a crdt pretty easily. It’s the same as the undo problem in collaborative editors - you just apply the inverse of the operation right after the change. And this would work with conflicts - say commits X and Y+Z conflict, and you’re in a conflicting state, you could just roll back commit Y which is the problem, while keeping X and Z. And at no point do you need to resolve the conflict first.

All this requires good tooling. But in general, CRDTs can store a superset of the data stored by git. And as a result, they can do all the same things and some new tricks.

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sroussey an hour ago | parent [-]

In theory, maybe. In practice… last write wins (LWW) is a CFDT operator, so replace every mention of CRDT with LWW and issues will more obvious.

Really though, the problem with merges is not conflicts, it’s when the merged code is wrong but was correct on both sides before the merge. At least a conflict draws your attention.

When I had several large (smart but young) teams merging left and right this would come up and they never checked merged code.

Multiply by x100 for AI slop these days. And I see people merge away when the AI altered tests to suit the broken code.

	▲	josephg 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> In practice… last write wins (LWW) is a CFDT operator, so replace every mention of CRDT with LWW and issues will more obvious. Yeah. A lot of people are also confused by the twin meanings of the word "conflict". The "C" in CRDT stands for "Conflict (free)", but that really means "failure free". Ie, given any two concurrent operations, there is a well defined "merge" of the two operations. The merge operation can't fail. The second meaning is "conflict" as in "git commit conflict", where a merge gets marked as requiring human intervention. Once you define the terms correctly, its possible to write a CRDT-with-commit-conflicts. Just define a "conflict marker" which are sometimes emitted when merging. Then merging can be defined to always succeed, sometimes emitting conflict markers along the way. > Really though, the problem with merges is not conflicts, it’s when the merged code is wrong but was correct on both sides before the merge. CRDTs have strictly more information about whats going on than Git does. At worst, we should be able to remake git on top of CRDTs. At best, we can improve the conflict semantics.