Original document has a list of instructions. The first instruction says “delete line 3”. User 1 offline deletes line 3. User 2 updates the instructions so that step 1 says “delete line 4”. Merged result when user 1 comes back online: step 1 says “delete line 4” and line 3 is deleted with the users none the wiser about what happened unless they double check the merged result. Physically the result is merged consistently but logically the end result of the document is not what was intended.
CRDT just guarantees that the document merges an edit stream in some sensible way without any need for manual conflict resolution. However, such resolution doesn’t (and can’t really) understand logically that the merged result is not what was intended to have happened. This is a contrived example but you can imagine similar scenarios and it’s concerning that people think CRDTs would solve the scenario I presented somehow when they solve a much more constrained technical problem. Imagine you have a CRDT algorithm for managing distributed state. And then you update the code about how the state itself is interpreted or managed. Now you have the problem of differing versions of code running mutating the document containing the state and the document is always in some valid state, but the server are not actually in agreement about how to apply the mutations and the state can diverge in unintended ways.
I get it that you can reach conflicting states, but not with this particular example.
Assuming updates are synced through a centralized server, if user 1 has seen the “delete line 3” instruction, it means that instruction was committed by user 2. At this point they can’t “edit” the first instruction. You can only move forward. Undoing the line 3 deletion is in itself a new instruction adding the line back; then line 4 gets deleted and both clients’ states have converged.
Reread what I wrote as what you wrote seems to be a totally different formulation. User 1 deletes line 3 while User 2 updates the instruction concurrently. The end result is the unintended line is deleted due to a race. The CRDT preserved the structure of the document but not it’s semantic contents.
Ha, I thought by instructions you meant CRDT commands, not actual text instructions.
This is not a failure of CRDT but an inevitable consequence of trying to point to a specific line in a live document. It can happen even without concurrent updates, just two people editing a document in turns; as such it is impossible to resolve regardless of merge strategies, you have to use some kind of section marker that stays in place within the text as it moves (which is basically what every collaborative editor does internally).
