Re: [9front] Enabling a service

["Roberto E. Vargas Caballero" <k0ga@shike2.com>]

Hi,

On Wed, May 08, 2024 at 11:10:00AM -0500, Jacob Moody wrote:
> On 5/8/24 10:49, Frank D. Engel, Jr. wrote:
> > How did it work for Venti when there were multiple users?
> 
> My understanding of venti is somewhat limited to take my explanation with a grain of salt.
> If you have divergent fossils using the same venti you will get divergent root scores, they
> become two paths that have to be merged manually.

Yes, that is what would happen. Fossil is not designed at all to be a
distributed shared file system. If you back two fossil fs to the same
venti you will have two different fs, no merge, no conflict, no anything.

> No matter how you cut you are going to have to deal with multiple people merging
> their cache in to the single root of truth with potentially latent updates.
> Either you have to serialize all mutations at the source of truth (and at that point
> you are latent bound) or you have to be clever about merging. A lot of ink has been
> spilled about this problem in the scope of web programming (CRDs iirc), perhaps
> that may serve as some inspiration.

I would suggest to take a look to AFS (Andrew File System, that I think had also
an evoultion but I don't remember the name) and how it works, and the implications.
Sometimes you can merge the changes, and other times you have to request
human decisions.

Regards,