[holtwick]

For certain scenarios there will be conflicts, take a boolean value. Client A sets it and client B unsets it. There can only be one winner.

But that might be a benefit from the proposed log sync, because these conflicting situations can be shown and marked for human review in the UI. Each step of change is well documented and the history can fully be reviewed.

[vlovich123]

Note that in the example I gave there’s not even a conflict to notice. You just have meta instructions telling you what to do within a document. You apply those instructions offline but in the mean time your meta instructions are updated online. You come back and synchronize your changes but there’s nothing that suggests your offline sync against the meta instructions was stale so your edits are applied based on stale meta instructions resulting in a logically undesirable result.

This is basically a TOCTOU race in a distributed context and CRDTs do not magically solve this problem because it’s not solvable. That’s why we have PAXOS and RAFT to do such things and why many many papers have been written trying to solve the Byzantine generals problem in constrained scenarios with well defined criteria.