Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: [cdv-devel] more merging stuff (bit long...)

[Bram Cohen]

Nathaniel Smith wrote:

> Well, it's that weird edge case that has me wondering, actually.  For
> those who don't follow the minutiae of our conversations with creepy
> detail, the example is (with "ab" meaning "line a, then line b"):
>  <nothing>
>    /  \
>   a    b
>   |\  /|
>   | \/ |
>   | /\ |
>   |/  \|
>   ab   ba
>    \  /
>     ??
>
>  [...]
>
> AFAICT, the here problem really is just that the global ordering
> assumption pcdv makes is wrong.  What this is is an ordering conflict...
> but the very phrase "ordering conflict" makes no sense at all in pcdv
> terms.  Thinking about it in an abstract sort of way, this seems an odd
> fact about pcdv merge, since the structure of the domain is "an ordered
> list", it's all _about_ ordering...

I think you're incorrect, and the problem is that the ab ordering is
something new even though a and b individually aren't new, and that there
is a way of making this be a proper conflict without allowing reordering
(in other words, having the weave be aba). This is getting fairly
technical though, and my ideas on this subject are rather half-baked, and
related to the much more ambitious and important problem of supporting
convergence, so I'll explain them when they're more coherent.

-Bram