Re: [SyncEvolution] A rather general question about synchronisation (as in syncevolution) compared with what rsync (for example) does
On Jan 9, 2011, at 14:04 , Chris G wrote:
> 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.
>
Rsync (or at least wrappers which use it) can decide which of two files
to keep by looking to see which is the newer.
If it was that easy :-)
Sync peers all have slightly differening ideas of the concept "calendar item" or
"contact", so the real challenge is not just to find which side has most recent
data, but especially which data is available at one side at all. If you just choose
"most recent", you'll eventually loose all data but what the dumbest (most
limited) sync participant can store.
Just imagine a mobile which stores name and tel numbers, but no postal address. If the
most recent update (say, to a telephone number) comes from such a device, there's a
whole lot of field by field merging magic needed to avoid loosing the postal address a
more capable device might have.
Lukas