Post #1404668

2026-02-18 04:53 UTC

@nasser @technomancy oh, yeah, and conflicts! I know CRDT is supposed to Just Work, but I expect there will still be a complex UI for "you did this on your phone and that on your laptop. the result is stupid. how fix?" Implementing it more than once was too much. Even now, I run into this with org-mode files and just a single user (me). If I mark a task as done twice, which completion timestamp is correct? Etc. CRDT would be better than SVN merge conflict resolution, at least.

Replies (1)

@nasser@merveilles.town 2026-02-18 10:58

@trurl @technomancy yeah the whole conceit of CRDTs in general and automerge in particular is that they handle conflicts. if you do something on your laptop and you do something on your phone you are guaranteed to see the same result on both devices after syncing. you still need to design your schema well but things like eg both devices marked a task as complete is not a problem. this is why I'm building on an existing thing written by experts in a principled language -- it's not easy to build one of these things and get them right, but the automerge team has done just that. that's why I feel any frontend complexity what arises from automerge are justifiable. auth and identity mirror git. I'm planning on using the local git user name and email as the author identity for edits you make locally. and the whole thing piggybacks on git refs and remotes so it has the exact semantics of git itself in the regard. nothing too clever.

Open ##1404669