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Summary of Inconsistency Avoidance Mechanisms

To summarise the limitations necessary to ensure eventual consistency after the resolution network partitioning:

These restrictions will ensure that eventual consistency is achievable, even in the face of continuing modification during a network partitioning. However, they are not always sufficient to ensure that the contents of the document eventually converge on what all of the users actually wish it to be. Although this could be achieved by locking of blocks to ensure that only one person can modify the a block at a time, we believe this restriction is unnecessary and would restrict usage of the editor. Indeed, under many circumstances, the usage patterns of the editor are likely to be such that large scale simultaneous editing of a block during a network partitioning will not happen because the vocal discussion needed to do so will be possible. If users are concerned about simultaneous editing of a block during a network partition, they should checkpoint the block to ensure no unseen changes can be made to it. For paranoid users, this checkpointing procedure could be automated, although we do not believe this is desirable or necessary.


next up previous contents
Next: Usability Issues Up: Shared Applications in the Previous: Effectively Simultaneous Insertion of
Jon CROWCROFT
1998-12-03