From my limited understanding fully persistent data structures allow changes to be made to previous nodes, with new nodes creating a branch rooted at the changed node, resulting in a tree of nodes and also disallowing the remerging of these branches.
o o o
/
o o o o o o o o o
\
o o o
Confluently persistent data structures on the other hand seem to allow the merging of these branches even though over time they may accumulate conflicting modifications to the contents of their given nodes.
o o o o o o o o o o o o
\
o o o o o x x x
\ /
o o o
I think I've searched the given research for an algorithm about how to potentially handle merge conflicts arising from this situation but have come up with nothing. Real world examples like git appear to punt this question to the user for manual resolution. Is this really the only option? Thanks for reading!