Concept: Simulating Patches with The Supergraph

I think, we can simulate the patch ideas and interface while sticking to model everything not as patches but as document versions in the supergraph. We need:

• to divide data into smaller structured parts (but we wanted to do that anyway),
• intelligently consider follows-edges.

Imagine, you have a Document with two paragraphs:

If someone creates a new version of P1 we get a new version of D (by essence propagation):

(follows-edges are blue.)

Now while looking at D' someone modifies P2. Once again we get a new version D'':

If you now look at D and its essence you have three follows-edges to consider, labelled p, q and r. r is the interesting one here. It should be no problem to build an interface that allows you to pull in P2' into D and thereby creating a new version of D (called E) that didn’t exist before:

This version E implicitly existed as a possibility once P2' was created. It can be created ephemerally to be looked at in an interface and it can be brought into existence (in the supergraph) if someone considers E relevant.

Isn’t that great?

Now here is something even darcs cannot do (in one text file):

Imagine someone changes the order of the paragraphs in D'', (E is removed for clarity):

We look at D''', its essence and all the follows-edges, again labelled p, q and r. Reverting r is trivial and would just revert the change and lead to D'' which already exists. But an interface could allow you to try out a version where the paragraphs’ order is changed, but P2' (for example) is reverted to P2 (via q, creating F):