Editing conflicts

[tgirod]

First: I've been dreaming of something like this for several years now.

Now, to my question: how does NS manage editing conflicts when synchronizing several devices ? If done well, this would open the door to do collaborative editing of tiddlywiki, something I desperately long for.

[danielo515]

Hello @tgirod
Thank you for your interest on NoteSelf.

Regarding editing conflicts, we use pouchdb under the hood. This means that, by default, we use the same conflict resolve mechanism that pouchdb does. Each time a tiddler is edited, an unique revision ID is created, and the tiddler is saved as a new revision of the previous tiddler. If another person edits the same tiddler at the same time, an unique ID will be generated for that particular edition. Then when tiddlers are synchronized the tiddler with the highest edition ID (or more recent) is picked. This happens silently, but you can navigate through edition history using the UI. We don't have however a mechanism to pick one particular edition, neither for side-by side comparison. Pull requests on that regard are welcome.

Regards

[johnd0e]

This happens silently

Than it's just impossible to resolve such conflicts: the system never let us even know that there were any edit conflict.

Remember that pouchdb is good in offline, and imagine that 2 persons during same time make several edition offline.
What should happen when they go online, and their db try to synchronize with online couchdb?
The 1st person should succeed, but the 2nd person have to get warning about conflict, with the possibility to resolve it.
And it does not matter which edition was later, as long as both were independent and offline.

Actually I know nothing about pouchdb internals, so I am not sure if it ever possible to reliably resolve such conflicts.

I hope it's possible, as long as we have current and previous rev hashes to find if one is parent of another or not.

We don't have however a mechanism to pick one particular edition, neither for side-by side comparison.

Well, it's least important part after all. More important is to inform user about conflict, and save conflicting revisions in any form (may be as renamed tiddler).

[danielo515]

More important is to inform user about conflict, and save conflicting revisions in any form (may be as renamed tiddler)

Maybe it could be enough to just inform and save the tiddler as you said until we find a better way of resolving conflicts

[danielo515]

We added revision traveling not very long ago. Maybe it is solved by now?

[johnd0e]

Need to check this