Removing repo documents about automerge-repo HOT 3 CLOSED

I wholeheartedly support this! There are a couple of things that might be worth considering. One is that we should probably send an event through the system to tell other listeners to close / remove the document. For example, in Blutack we have an index of all known documents last viewed state for detecting when something has been edited so you know to check it again. We should be able to notice that the document was removed and de-bloat that.

Another question (to which I think the answer is no) is whether we should block re-fetching the document. If not, though, it makes this de-registration kind of tricky. Unless you actually eliminate all the references to the document you're likely to just re-fetch it automatically in the future.

As for propagating delete requests through the system, I agree that a good first version would just handle local removal, and we should be thoughtful about what the defaults are here to respect user agency.

One last thought is that it might be helpful to have something like git gc to find documents that are in your repository but not linked to by anything! This would be an application-specific piece of code but might come in handy.

Thanks for taking this on and let me know if I can help.

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Deleting something in such a way that it doesn't come back again when you sync with a peer that hasn't yet deleted it seems pretty essential to me. In CRDTs, this is exactly what tombstones are for. I believe the collection of documents is itself a CRDT – a set where elements (i.e. documents) can be added or removed. You could model it either as a 2-phase-set (once a document has been deleted it can't be added back again, at least not under the same ID), or an add-wins or remove-wins set (docs can be removed and re-added again, and you choose the behaviour if the same document is concurrently added and removed by different peers).

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