Re: [SyncEvolution] A rather general question about synchronisation (as in syncevolution) compared with what rsync (for example) does
On Sa, 2011-01-08 at 14:22 +0000, Chris G wrote:
I have been using synchronisation tools for quite a while (started
with
the Linux 'pilot' family with an early Palm) and also use rsync and
similar tools.
Is there possibly a case for simply synchronising the data on the
Phone/PDA with the PC/Cloud using something like rsync rather than
trying to translate between different representations of the data as
syncevolution does?
[...]
If, instead, there was a common data format used by both systems a
simple synchronisation would be all that's needed.
You give the main reason why this isn't very attractive in the real
world for complex data like PIM: there simply isn't one common format
which can be copied around without transformations.
Even if there was, how would such a system handle conflicts? To resolve
conflicts without simply duplicating items and putting the burden on the
user, you will end up parsing the conflicting items and merging them,
which defeats much of the advantage of "moving around blobs of data" as
rsync does.
CouchDB perhaps comes closest to what you want. To my knowledge, no-one
has tried to use it for complex data like calendar, and I'm skeptical
whether that would work - not because I think that CouchDB is bad, but
because I have seen too many attempts at modeling iCalendar 2.0 semantic
fail.
These are just ramblings really, brought on by the recent more
'philosophical' threads about where syncevolution is going.
I agree, this is worthwhile discussing.
--
Best Regards, Patrick Ohly
The content of this message is my personal opinion only and although
I am an employee of Intel, the statements I make here in no way
represent Intel's position on the issue, nor am I authorized to speak
on behalf of Intel on this matter.