David Roundy, the initial author of darcs, seems to disagree on this. From https://github.com/droundy/iolaus : > I realized that the semantics of git are actually not nearly so far from those of darcs as I had previously thought. In particular, if we view each commit as describing a patch in its "primitive context" (to use darcs-speak), then there is basically a one-to-one mapping from darcs' semantics to a git repository.