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.