This question is really deep. The "distributed" nature of Git makes some things easier than SVN: you can scale to large teams, work offline, split a repo into independent subrepos for a while (managed via branches; good luck with the merge!).
However, this isn't really what Pijul calls "distributed": in Pijul, this term is about the work that people are doing when working collectively on a shared file. Which datastructures allow asynchronous contributions to happen? How to represent conflicts? Those questions belong to the field of distributed computing, together with things like CRDTs and leader elections.
> (managed via branches; good luck with the merge!).
Haha... Oh, this reminds me... there's Ada mode for Emacs that functions like that. In order to build it you need to combine multiple branches that have each its own contents (i.e. it's essentially multiple repositories combined in one) in the same checkout. It's the most bizarre way to use Git I've seen in my life (outside of total noob stuff, like when a guy wrote his entire project in .gitignore)
On a more serious note: thanks. I see now what that means. Maybe I should find time to look more into the project!
However, this isn't really what Pijul calls "distributed": in Pijul, this term is about the work that people are doing when working collectively on a shared file. Which datastructures allow asynchronous contributions to happen? How to represent conflicts? Those questions belong to the field of distributed computing, together with things like CRDTs and leader elections.