[SyncEvolution] A rather general question about synchronisation (as in syncevolution) compared with what rsync (for example) does

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? I realise that syncevolution tries to put the data conversion in the interfaces at the 'ends' as it were but I believe many of the difficulties of getting syncevolution (and similar) to work in the modern environment are down to the difficulty of getting from "data format A on machine A" to "data format B on machine B". If, instead, there was a common data format used by both systems a simple synchronisation would be all that's needed. OK, it's probably not going to happen for the mainstream but for someone developing an application for the Linux (and related) desktop for example it could be a viable approach because all you'd need to do is to write something that would allow viewing and updating of data in the format used by the particular phone/PDA (or family thereof). In fact this is presumably what the jpilot (and the underlying libraries) did for the Palm PDAs and it's why they work so reliably and consistently. While they did their own data transfer they had no need to transform the data at all, they simply kept it in the same/similar format on the PC that it was kept on the Palm device. These are just ramblings really, brought on by the recent more 'philosophical' threads about where syncevolution is going. -- Chris Green