Whenever a group splits into subgroups, e.g. due to a network partition, and later the subgroups merge back together, a MergeView instead of a View will be received by the application. The MergeView class is a subclass of View and contains as additional instance variable the list of views that were merged. As an example if the group denoted by view V1:(p,q,r,s,t) split into subgroups V2:(p,q,r) and V2:(s,t), the merged view might be V3:(p,q,r,s,t). In this case the MergeView would contains a list of 2 views: V2:(p,q,r) and V2:(s,t).