It seems like there's a couple of issues that can occur when deleting messages from the list. Managing the index of each message in the array of chat messages introduces a fair amount of complexity throughout the codebase.
I wonder if it would be simpler to never delete elements from the list of chat messages, and completely ignore indexes. Message deletion can be expressed as a message edit. For example, deleting a message is kind of the same as just marking it as deleted and showing "message deleted" in the UI.
If we follow this pattern throughout Jupyter Chat, this brings two major benefits:
- We always know exactly what index each message is.
- We don't have to ever update that index or re-calculate indices.
This is also essentially free in terms of memory use. In Yjs, items are never deleted, but simply marked as deleted in the data model. Therefore deleting a message doesn't really save any significant amount of memory anyways. If this change can simplify the codebase, I think we should take this opportunity.
@brichet What do you think?
Originally posted by @dlqqq in #194 (review)
Originally posted by @dlqqq in #194 (review)