Re: Question collaborative editing.

[Karl Fogel]

>IMO the problem of this approach is that if there’s any desync between
>buffer in the library and buffer in the editor the outcome is disastrous,
>and this can not only come from some bug — Emacs and C library
>has to talk asynchronously and bidirectionally, which means theoretically
>there will be case that Emacs does some change, sent a message to
>C library, but some message before C library receive the change from
>Emacs arrives later 
>    Emacs C-Library
> |      |  \   /  |
> |      |    X   |
> |      |  /   \  |
>V
>Although the latency window on local machine is very small, the latency
>of Emacs Lisp interpreter responding to events is a another complication...
>There are way to work around this of course, but it’ll definitely require more
>work rather than just sending simple operation and buffer position, at least
>there need to be UID for each operation and some transaction mechanism.
>
>I see that Tandem send old text and new text with the text operation. This
>is definitely a workaround with no correctness guarantee, and it doesn’t
>specify what to do when a desync happens. But those are just my mutering
>about correctness, I can imagine that it might work good enough in practice.

Well, hey, Emacs has an `md5' function :-).  For example, the result of

  (insert (md5 (current-buffer)))

is

  5d260ed0f9899cbb9fc53ec96324f5d5

(Of course, the result was wrong as soon as I evaluated it!)

Best regards,
-Karl

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