> * Merkle trees are great for two-way synchronization, but it's not > immediately clear to me how you'd use them to bootstrap a single source -> > target replication. I might just be missing a straightforward extension of > the tech here.
This is the point that's important with checksums and so on. Merkle trees are great when you want to mirror structured data but CouchDB replication is a mirror operation. Think, N db's replicating to a central DB. you have a mixture of things which breaks checksums (or at least any obvious application I can think of given our internal structures)
