Supported Patch Replay Planning

Read-only patch replay handles the current conservative operation subset, including DC-12 arbitrary-span text edits.

The command is:

prikk checkout --patch-plan [path] [--ref REF]

It walks the single-parent block chain from oldest to newest, loads any snapshot Blob attached to a block, and applies supported Patch operations in block patch order.

Supported operations:

• CreateFile
• DeleteFile
• EditText for deterministic content-anchored arbitrary spans
• ReplaceBinary (DC-73)
• ChangePerm (DC-73)

Unsupported operations still fail the plan clearly:

• RenamePath — not a node-model gap: commit never authors it, renames become delete+create
• CreateSymlink — not a node-model gap: symlink authoring is refused outright
• merge/conflict algebra

This command does not write the worktree. It only proves that the current sealed history can be replayed into an in-memory snapshot manifest using the operation subset implemented so far.

Content at a point (RFC 143)

The replay above already reconstructs every file’s bytes internally, then discards them once the plan is proven. --format json exposes those bytes instead, for exactly the paths you name:

prikk checkout --patch-plan --format json --content-path <repo-relative path> [--ref REF]

--content-path is repeatable and required for --format json to report anything — there is no whole-tree default. A requested path that never resolved in the replay degrades to not_found (not an error); an unsupported operation anywhere in the walked chain still fails the whole call, never folds into a partial-but-successful response. A bare --format json with no --content-path reports metadata only — an empty content and not_found, a populated coverage — since there is nothing to scope content to and nothing to guess at.

patch-plan-content-v1’s coverage field is not a completeness promise: it names which operation kinds this specific replay actually applied (create-file, delete-file, edit-text, replace-binary, change-perm) and that the walk was single-parent — the same conservative subset --patch-plan supports above, not a claim that every operation kind in history is covered. RenamePath and CreateSymlink still fail the call outright, exactly as they fail the read-only replay itself.

Binary content is never emitted as bytes: a BinaryFile node reports its current blob id and declared size only. A path that a snapshot seeded but the replayed chain never subsequently touched has no way to know its own text-vs-binary kind — snapshots carry no kind field — so it reports as opaque (size only) rather than guessing.

This surface exists to let another tool compare two replayed points without prikk owning comparison semantics itself — prikk still has no diff, and this does not add one. See show for the sibling case: one block or patch’s own recorded content, no replay needed for path-addressed operations.