The Draft That Overwrote the Publish — Python Bug Hunt

Briefing

Inspired by the sync-conflict horror stories of every note-taking and CMS product: an old offline draft comes back online and steamrolls the article someone published an hour ago. Last-write-wins needs to compare timestamps, not arrival order.

sync.py merges an incoming record with the stored one.

Bug report

BUG-LWW · Priority: High (lost content) · Reported by: editors

merge(saved, incoming) — both have updated_at:

• keep whichever has the NEWER updated_at
• ties keep the SAVED (server) copy

Observed: incoming always wins — a laptop that was offline all week just replaced today's homepage with last Tuesday's.

Logs

[sync] doc 41: incoming updated_at=1699000000 overwrote saved 1699600000

The code as shipped

src/sync/sync.py (editable)

# Last-write-wins merge of a stored and incoming record.

def merge(saved, incoming):
    return incoming