That sounds like it solves part of the sync problem, but not conflict resolution or offline business rules in a general way.
hmm no i think it does. the 'Resilience and availability' section is relevant for your question: https://developer.holochain.org/concepts/4_dht/
holochain is completely distributed, so there is no 'offline' and 'online' because there is no third party. it sounds weird writing that but i'm hoping it might challenge you to dig a bit deeper into the docs, because it's there. if not, please come back and let me know so i can pass on feedback about the docs that were unclear or unsatisfactory for you.
> does not solve conflict resolution
from the docs: "Holochain DNAs specify validation rules for every type of entry or link. This empowers agents to check the integrity of the data they see. When called upon to validate data, it allows them to identify corrupt peers and publish a warrant against them. [...] (the DNA is simply a collection of functions for creating, accessing, and validating data.)"
> All the DHT does is accumulate all these [updates] and present them to the application.
Yes, people will want conflict-resolution for contention on scarce resources, and it'd be lovely to have that baked into the system.
Two options (and yes, both still leave conflict resolution in the app dev's hands):
- Have the zome function resolve the conflict after it retrieves conflicting metadata from the DHT
- In the future we'll bake conflict resolution right into the network layer, so DHT authorities can resolve the conflict automatically using CRDTS or manually by pinging the nodes that published conflicting information so they can resolve it themselves.
It's also worth mentioning Syn, a library which uses operational transforms (a precursor to CRDTs) for conflict-free collaborative document editing. https://github.com/holochain/syn. I'm looking forward to seeing someone produce something similar, but with CRDTs.