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Randall Leeds commented on COUCHDB-1080:
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With your patch, commit_to_both can return errors. Before it just threw badmatch exceptions. The old way, the only path to the case clause with my log message was when a successful _ensure_full_commit happened but the instance_start_time did not match (source or target crashed or closed, may have lost some changes we replicated, so we can't checkpoint).

I like the way you changed it, but I also like the helpful error message I added. Maybe now we can have four case clauses in do_checkpoint and that way we can be very clear to the user about what went wrong? Does this make sense to you now?

> fail fast with checkpoint conflicts
> -----------------------------------
>
>                 Key: COUCHDB-1080
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-1080
>             Project: CouchDB
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: Replication
>    Affects Versions: 1.0.2
>            Reporter: Randall Leeds
>             Fix For: 1.1, 1.2
>
>         Attachments: COUCHDB-1080-fdmanana.patch, paranoid_checkpoint_failure.patch, paranoid_checkpoint_failure_v2.patch
>
>
> I've thought about this long and hard and probably should have submitted the bug a long time ago. I've also run this in production for months.
> When a checkpoint conflict occurs it is almost always the right thing to do to abort.
> If there is a rev mismatch it could mean there's are two conflicting (continuous and one-shot) replications between the same hosts running. Without reloading the history documents checkpoints will continue to fail forever. This could leave us in a state with many replicated changes but no checkpoints.
> Similarly, a successful checkpoint but a lost/timed-out response could cause this situation.
> Since the supervisor will restart the replication anyway, I think it's safer to abort and retry.

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