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necovektoday at 4:31 PM0 repliesview on HN

Not really. Launchpad.net does not have any public branches I could share atm as an example, but Bazaar (now breezy) allowed having a nested "merge commit": your trunk would have "flattened" merge commits ("Merge branch foo"), and under it you could easily get to each individual commit by a developer ("Prototype", "Add test"...). It would really be shown as a tree, but smartness was wven richer.

This was made possible by using a DAG for commit storage and referencing, instead of relying on file contents and series of commits per reference. Merge behaviour was much smarter in case of diverging tip or criss-cross merges. But this ultimately was harder and slower to implement, and developers did not value this enough and they instead accepted the Git trade-offs.

So you seamlessly did both with a different VCS without splitting those up: in a sense, computers and software worried about that for us.