On 8 July 2010 11:55, John Barstow <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 12:45 PM, Daniel Paull <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Regarding the "OT insertion order design proposal", I do not see why > > this change would be necessary. Perhaps I'm tainted by having worked > > with more general OT algorithms, but the order that results from > > concurrent inserts at the same location is arbitrary - the only > > requirement is that all sites need to agree on which order is chosen. > > > > I have to agree, the algorithm change struck me as totally > superfluous. I understand the intention is to make it more intuitive, > but in reality it doesn't accomplish much on that front as concurrent > editing in the same location never turns out exactly as one expects > (particularly once you start looking at things such as the effects of > clock skew between editors and variable latency...) > > So I'm not sure it's worth the effort to implement this proposal, > especially as it will require a rewrite and rollout of existing > clients and servers.
Thanks John - that's a good point you make about the upgrade effort. However in order to have a reasonably-behaving conversation model without the OT change we'd need to instead either migrate all existing data to a correct (i.e. backwards) interpretation and/or roll out new code to do the right thing. In our experience that is much more work than we envisage rolling out the OT change to be. It also raises the issue of protocol versioning, which is a problem we've been thinking about for a long time. We need to address that issue in any case as we need a mechanism to evolve and improve the protocol. This will present a good opportunity to exercise that with a relatively small protocol change. We're still working on a filled-out proposal for protocol versioning. We'll publish a proposal and post here when we have one. But in short this OT change is a forcing function and opportunity to solve that problem too. Alex. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Wave Protocol" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/wave-protocol?hl=en.
