[dude187]

Well, the contents of the commit is a patch plus metadata. They point to a parent commit, and layer themselves in the tree.

The problem would be if a clone doesn't fetch the new version of the patch and generates a new commit that would conflict with the modified commit. You're changing the base all the future diffs are based off of. It might just jumble the source essentially corrupt the file, but I'm not sure.

[wheybags]

Contents of a commit is not a patch, it's the whole tree. The got ui presents it as a patch, but that's generated at runtime by the "git diff" command. It does internally use delta compression to save storage space, but it's not necessarily a straight delta between a commit and its direct ancestor (and that's just an internal optimisation).