Git has a nice workflow (git send-email) in which you can send patches in human readable form over a mailing list, making it easy for people to comment by simply replying to the patches.
This could be even nicer for a patch based vcs, in which there is no chance of conflicts when you next pull from the repository after someone has applied your patches.
Is this workflow currently possible or likely to be possible in pijul? My scan of the manuals suggests patches can currently only be distributed in binary form?
Your hypothesis is right. Currently, pijul is storing its patches in a binary format, and there is no “equivalent” plain representation available. As far as I understood from my discussions with @pmeunier, because pijul is heavily relying on lines ID to represent its patch, having a readable plain representation that is as meaningful and powerfull as binary’s patches remains non-trivial, unfortunately.
I’d like to do it soon, actually, I can explain potential text formats to someone who likes to write parsers (I do like to write parsers, but I have very little time at the moment).