Post #2767725
2026-04-28 11:08 UTC
The interesting questions about merge semantics for collaborative document editing have to do with what happens if users are editing in the same place. My experience in reality is that people stay well away from wherever they see others' cursors in the document -- but once offline support exists, weird stuff like this would seem to come up a lot more often (unless, of course, users develop some ad-hoc out-of-band protocol to stay out of each other's way).
Replies (2)
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@lindsey@recurse.social 2026-04-28 11:12
(I would actually find it really interesting to study those ad-hoc, out-of-band protocols that people cook up for offline collaborative editing! You know the ones I mean: "I'm grabbing the lock on section 3" and so forth. Does anyone have a really sophisticated one that doesn't just amount to coarse-grained locking?)
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@JensHannemann@mastodon.online 2026-04-28 13:27
@lindsey@recurse.social Well, as they say in software engineering: “Version control cannot replace bad project management". The best way to avoid merge conflicts is to clearly communicate who is responsible for what part of the shared code/document.