[Sugar-devel] GSoC Groupthink Update: SharedTextDemo-4

[Walter Bender]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Benjamin M.
Schwartz<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Walter Bender wrote:
>> A private copy can be shared again. So it seems the real question is
>> one of merging. If each of us are working on different versions and we
>> want to share again, we need some reconciliation mechanism. I would
>> argue that for the time being, that should be a manual process.
>
> My entire GSoC project has been to automate that reconciliation process,
> and it has been working perfectly since SharedTextDemo-1.
>
> The thesis of Groupthink is that in order to run over a low-performance
> network, even "synchronous" collaboration must be treated as an
> asynchronous distributed process, with reconciliation required whenever an
> edit occurs.  It's happening on a timescale of seconds (or even
> milliseconds), so you may not notice it, but the required algorithms are
> the same regardless of timescale.
>
> The question here is how to expose this functionality to the user.  My
> mental model has been that there is an "abstract document" (possibly not
> textual) that we are all editing.  If we are not connected to each other,
> then we do not see each other's changes, but whenever we connect, our
> changes are synchronized. My mental image of the abstract document is a
> chaotic braid, with many independent threads joining and splitting, but at
> the largest scale still forming a single structure.
>
> I have imagined that it does not make sense to "merge" two threads that
> belong to different braids; each braid is an island universe.  Users may
> certainly use the contents of their current thread to seed a new braid
> though, this is "Keep a copy".  What I am suggesting is that users might
> occasionally want to isolate their personal thread, to make some
> high-finesse change incommunicado, and then merge it atomically with the
> other participants.
>
> --Ben
>
>

I can imagine that there is a correlation between the time between
merges and the degree of divergence of the documents. But as long as
merging is something you can back out of, there is no reason not to
automate it.

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org