ConverGO — A DVCS based on CvRDT updates

This work presents the design and evaluation of a decentralized Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) based on State based Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CvRDT). The project provides a proof-of-concept about how distributed collaborative approaches can be integrated along DVCS into a peer-to-peer version control environment while preserving eventual consistency and minimizing coordination overhead. Traditional distributed version control systems rely on explicit synchronization and merge procedures to reconcile concurrent modifications performed by multiple users. While these mechanisms provide strong traceability and deterministic history management, they often require manual conflict resolution and assume intermittent coordination between replicas (this is sometime an intended and desiderable behavior, expecially when human control is necessary). In contrast CRDT-based systems are designed to garantee weak-consistency (eventual consistency) automatically, to enable replicas to evolve independently while reaching a single consistent global state. Through ConverGO, we want to demonstrate how CRDT technicques can be successfully used to improve decentralized DVCS systems while also exposing challenge and tradeoff about event causal relations, history management, semantic delivery and system scalability. The resulting software is not to be intended as a real-world production ready library but as a proof-of-concept prototype to provide insight about the applicability of CRDT models in the DVCS context along discussion about its inner limitation and necessary improvoment to make it a working product