Offline Capabilites

[amenk]

When I loose the internet connection, I can not view secrets any more.

Are there any plans for offline capabilities? Even for the login?

[teh]

No plans but if you want to give it a shot I think there are a few parts to this:

1/ Change the fetching code to check whether the user is offline (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Online_and_offline_events) with navigator.onLine
2/ If offline read data from localstore
3/ If online store encrypted data in localstore

There's probably more I forgot about around logging in etc.

[amenk]

Okay, sounds good so far.
But what happens when I change any data? Is there any kind of versioning or locking?

Testcase:

1. I am offline
2. Open a cached secret
   2A. Another user changes at the same secret at the server
3. Change something
4. Go online
5. Save

[teh]

That's an issue with all distributed data stores. E.g. git has merges, couchdb has various conflict resolutions (latest wins) e.g. We'd have to pick one and run with that.

A read-only offline version might be a good start.

[amenk]

How is it currently handled?
I mean conflicts already can appear, if in a shared secret, two users are editing at the same time, right?

[teh]

Currently it's newest write wins.

[amenk]

Oh my ...

I think it would be sufficient to have a revision number and allow only writing if I had the last revision number. (OpenStreetMap is doing it that way)

By the way ... are secret entries versioned already?

[teh]

There's no versioning. The server has very little information - that's a design decision. It's a dumb key value store with auditing and sharing.

[amenk]

We might just allow editing only when you are online, what do you think? Like this the feature should be not-so-hard?

[teh]

There isn't even a concept of "being online" but we could introduce that if you want to give it a go.

First though it might be interesting to understand what problems you are hitting>

[amenk]

I just want to be able to access my passwords when I am offline.
example use case: Our companys router is offline, I need the password to login and fix it.
or: I am in Ethiopia and they seem to block the access to passopolis -> no passwords accessible