On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 04:43, John Merrells <[email protected]> wrote: > I now realize that the document revisions are really just a side effect > of the implementation of the async multi master replication... as you > need them to do the collision detection.
Not quite. It's actually for collision detection on document updates, or MultiVersion Concurrency Control. CouchDB exposes the revision to the client because saving a document without specifying the latest revision is a conflict: the client must specify the revision she intends to update. Couch will not allow a document update if it has changed since the client last read it.
