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Alex Kreitzberg (Nov 28 2025 at 16:04):@Peva Blanchard asked Baez for information about categorical version control. I wanted to mention I've heard of but haven't read the paper "Homotopical Patch Theory" by Angiuli, Morehouse, Licata, and Harper. It is about modeling patches in version control systems with groupoids via HoTT.
David Corfield (Nov 28 2025 at 16:11):There's a post, Structure-aware version control via observational bridge types, by David Jaz Myers.
Peva Blanchard (Nov 28 2025 at 18:04):Oh nice, thank you!
Peva Blanchard (Nov 28 2025 at 19:06):David Corfield said:
There's a post, Structure-aware version control via observational bridge types, by David Jaz Myers.
Oh, I forgot I already knew that blog post. (I even added a comment...)
John Baez (Nov 29 2025 at 13:41):I wonder if the system David Jaz and Sophie are using to write their "thesis" for ARIA, called Forester, uses any category theory.
David Corfield (Nov 29 2025 at 14:00):Information on Forester is here, including a presentation.
John Baez (Nov 29 2025 at 15:57):I see; it looks like it's maintained by John Sterling and some other category theorists.
Graham Manuell (Nov 30 2025 at 08:11):Also see this paper which I think is (one of?) the first on using category theory for version control. The ideas are quite nice. Though iirc there might be a mistake in the part of the paper discussing deletion. In any case, this approach was used in the pijul VCS (possibly with some modifications, but at least when I last looked there was very little documentation available, so I don't know the details).
Tom Hirschowitz (Dec 01 2025 at 14:26):Yes, Pijul started started from this paper, but then some significant additional work was needed to make it into a full-fledged vcs. Among other things, concurrency issues led to developing the sanakirja persistent database infrastructure.