utils/crdt_sync_dart
Krzysztof kuhy Rudnicki f902bbe0aa
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Let a mirror read survive the primary being down
MirrorSyncClient promised that reads consult both backends "so the
cutover order is irrelevant", but every read called self.primary
unguarded. A Firebase outage therefore produced no data at all and the
GitHub mirror was never consulted -- the union read silently degraded to
nothing, precisely when the fallback existed to help.

This is not hypothetical: screen-locker's workout sync hit it on
2026-08-10, where a DNS failure reading the primary took down the whole
locker rather than falling back.

Reads (list_directory, get_file_text, get_string_map) now degrade to the
mirror when the primary raises, and only fail when NEITHER backend can
answer -- returning an empty result would be indistinguishable from "no
data", which callers act on. Writes keep the old asymmetry on purpose: a
write the primary did not accept has not happened, so it must still fail
the tick.

A mirror that cannot bulk-read (GitHub) contributes nothing but is not a
failure, so it cannot by itself make a revision-map read raise. Both
language ports agree on that.

Same fix in the Dart port, which had all three read paths wrong too and
runs on the phone. Two older tests asserted the buggy read-fail-closed
behaviour and are renamed to describe what they actually exercise: the
both-sides-failed case.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01JS5V44jkHZiH1wC7BH5h5n
2026-08-10 14:30:29 +02:00
..
lib Let a mirror read survive the primary being down 2026-08-10 14:30:29 +02:00
test Let a mirror read survive the primary being down 2026-08-10 14:30:29 +02:00
tool crdt_sync: add a Firebase Realtime Database transport behind a RemoteStore seam 2026-08-03 18:14:25 +02:00
.gitignore Initial implementation: unified CRDT merge scheme + GitHub sync transport 2026-07-05 20:48:07 +02:00
analysis_options.yaml Initial implementation: unified CRDT merge scheme + GitHub sync transport 2026-07-05 20:48:07 +02:00
LICENSE Initial implementation: unified CRDT merge scheme + GitHub sync transport 2026-07-05 20:48:07 +02:00
pubspec.yaml Let a mirror read survive the primary being down 2026-08-10 14:30:29 +02:00
README.md Docs: correct stale 'not yet consumed' notes and old install URLs 2026-07-11 23:31:41 +02:00

crdt_sync

Shared CRDT merge scheme + GitHub-Contents-API sync transport, extracted for reuse across four personal apps that each need cross-device sync: todo, diet_guard's Flutter app, wake_alarm's phone_app, and screen-locker's workout_app. Pure Dart -- no Flutter SDK dependency (package:http only) -- so it works in both Flutter apps and plain Dart tooling. Mirrors the Python crdt-sync package module-for-module and test-for-test, so the merge algorithm canonically agrees on both sides of any sync between a Dart client and a Python one.

The merge scheme

See the Python package's README for the full rationale; in short, a generic LWW-map-with-sticky-remove:

  • Hlc -- a Hybrid Logical Clock (wallTimeMs, counter, nodeId), totally ordered, monotonic even across clock skew.
  • Record -- an id, a per-field last-writer-wins map (fieldName -> (value, Hlc)), and a sticky deleted flag (deleted = a.deleted || b.deleted, never the other way -- a delete can never be silently undone).
  • Log -- Map<String, Record>, merged by taking the union of ids and merging shared ones.

All three merges are commutative and idempotent -- see test/log_test.dart for the concrete convergence-property tests.

Install

Consume via a git dependency on the utils monorepo:

dependencies:
  crdt_sync:
    git:
      url: https://github.com/kuhyx/utils
      ref: crdt_sync_dart-v0.2.0
      path: crdt_sync_dart

Usage

import 'package:crdt_sync/crdt_sync.dart';

final nodeId = 'phone';
final clock = Hlc.newTick(nodeId);
final record = Record(
  id: 'abc123',
  fields: {'text': ('buy milk', clock)},
);

final client = GitHubClient(owner: 'kuhyx', repo: 'my-app-sync', token: token);
final merged = await syncLog(
  client: client,
  deviceId: nodeId,
  pathPrefix: 'devices',
  localLog: {record.id: record},
  encode: (log) => jsonEncode(log.map((k, r) => MapEntry(k, r.toJson()))),
  decode: (text) => (jsonDecode(text) as Map<String, dynamic>).map(
    (k, v) => MapEntry(k, Record.fromJson(v as Map<String, dynamic>)),
  ),
);

syncLog pulls every other device's last-pushed log from <pathPrefix>/<other-device-id>/..., merges each into the local log with mergeLogs, then pushes this device's own merged result back up.

Local persistence (LogStore)

The merge scheme above is in-memory only. For an app that needs to keep its Log on disk and drive a live UI off it, this package also ships a domain-agnostic LogStore:

import 'package:crdt_sync/crdt_sync.dart';
import 'package:crdt_sync/crdt_sync_io.dart'; // FileLogPersistence (dart:io)

final store = LogStore(
  persistence: FileLogPersistence(File('$docsDir/notes.json')),
  nodeId: 'phone',
);
await store.load();

// Reactive read: re-derive a domain view whenever anything changes. Filtering,
// sorting and search live here, in the app -- the store is field-agnostic.
final Stream<List<Record>> visible = store.changes.map(
  (_) => store.values.where((r) => !r.deleted).toList(),
);

await store.upsert(Record(id: 'n1', fields: {'text': ('hi', store.nextHlc())}));
await store.delete('n1'); // sticky tombstone, not a hard remove

// After a sync tick, swap in the merged result:
await store.replaceAll(await syncLog(/* ... */, localLog: store.snapshot()));

LogStore is pure Dart (import it from the main barrel); the filesystem-backed FileLogPersistence lives behind the separate crdt_sync_io.dart entrypoint so the core stays web-safe. Querying is deliberately not in the library — a Record's fields are an opaque map, so the app filters store.values itself. The Python side mirrors the on-disk format via crdt_sync.dump_log/read_log (load/save only; no reactive stream — that's a Dart/Flutter convenience).

Development

dart pub get
dart analyze
dart test