gmaclennan

Substack can probably give a better answer, but my understanding is that CouchDB only holds a version history since the last replication between clients, and then conflicts need to be resolved before replication can continue, after which version history is lost. With OSM-p2p no data is every deleted, it is all just in the underlying hyperlog. It's more like git than CouchDB, and each record has a complete history, and can be forked and merged and will continue to sync/replicate.

Yes, right now this is for setting up your own "OpenStreetMap" that will work offline. The author of this work, substack, is also working/thinking about p2p infrastructure for OSM. See https://peermaps.github.io/

If two or more peers edit the same record, it doesn't create a conflict but instead that record simply has two versions in the database - like a fork in a git repo. These can be merged at any time in the future, but prior to that two versions can continue to exist and replicate. For more about why we designed it like this see: https://github.com/digidem/osm-p2p-db/blob/master/doc/archit...