Comment by lallysingh
5 years ago
> sequencing the edits of independent actors is likely not something you will solve with a data structure.
Any multiplayer game does this. Git does this as well.
So of course you can do this, it's a matter of how you reconcile conflicts. Real-time interactive games will generally choose a FIFO ordering based on what came into the server's NIC first. Git makes the person pushing the merge reconcile first.
For docs, live editing seems to work the same as in games. Reconciliation for the decentralized workflow will be interesting, but it's just going to be minimizing the hit to a user when their version loses the argument.
But git doesn't do this. It punts to the user pretty quickly. (Even when it performs a merge, it is expected that the user confirmed the merge with a build. That is, git just claims the states combined without stopping in the same lines of the same files. There merge has to be verified by a user, from its perspective.)
Games, similarly, typically have a master state server. Yes, they optimistically show some state locally, but the entire process checkpoints with a central state constantly. (Else you get jerky behaviors pretty quickly as the states diverge more and more in ways that can't be reconciled without committing to a branch over another.)
Edit: that is, I would think the point is to force more, smaller arguments. Anything else puts more at risk as you lose one. Right?
You're agreeing with me on both points wrt git/games...?
The best way to prevent damage from arguments is to avoid them. Like how docs shows cursors so you know to avoid areas that are actively edited. Combined with the tiny incremental changes (often 1 char), users assume that any conflicts are due to each other instead of any distributed inconsistences.
Apologies, I'm meaning my statement to ask how these help. I get that OT needs a central server to be the arbiter if what happened. I don't get how these data structure mitigate that.
Optimistically, I can see how they help. But, pessimistically, it looks like they just make the bad case worse.
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