How should the "unavailable" status interact with network adapter startup? about automerge-repo HOT 3 OPEN

Interesting. I would say the second option is preferable to an arbitrary timeout. Or at the very least have some way of exposing to users that the network is not ready before they request a document.

I would have thought that the current implementation does commence sync for an unavailable doc automatically when a new peer connects. If not, I would say it should anyway?

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We can implement beginning sync for an unavailable document when a new peer connects quite easily. Right now that would still be an awkward API though I think because it sort of makes the "unavailable" status less useful. In the snippet above the user would have to always wait on whenReady with some kind of timeout regardless of whether the document resolved as unavailable because they would still need to wait for the network to start up.

I think instead having a kind of "network ready" state for the whole repo might be what is required. That way the user waits for "network ready" and then if a document is unavailable they know that it's not down to the network waiting to come up.

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I've been fighting with this a little bit lately. In trail-runner network connections can come and go in the frontend as ServiceWorkers get replaced. My solution right now is to block on calling find until I've set up a network connection but I don't think this is necessarily the best approach.

I think the issue here is that "network ready" isn't monotonic (your network might report being online prematurely or might go offline again as you travel through a tunnel) and also you may already have all the data you need locally. find() only returns undefined if you don't have the data yet!

In TEE, @geoffreylitt uses a loading screen to guard against trying to do things before connecting. I don't think that's quite the right approach either but it suggests there may be options here.

One thing I've been meaning to do for a while is to start exposing some kind of explanations for why a document didn't load. Was it that there were no peers, that there were peers but nobody would give you the document, was the file corrupted, or was it a bogus input? So many ways to fail.

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