On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 12:56:27PM +1100, Nick Jenkins wrote: > Hi Patrick, > > Thank you very much for the great explanations and information! > > > Writing up your experience for LWN would be useful to get the attention > > of other developers and potential packagers. > > I sent LWN a rough draft to see if they were interested, but the > response was "no": > > > The article, as written, is not really suitable for LWN. We tend to > > avoid how-to articles in general; we also write in a very different > > style than is found here. > > > > There could be a place for a look at this topic. But there would be a > > lot more interest in a local, free-software solution than in > > somebody's web application. > > So I think you're in need of someone who is a) a better writer than me, > and b) preferably someone who has set up a local server. > > However, in the course of doing the very rough draft, I found myself > wondering whether SyncML could ultimately do for contacts + calendars + > notes + tasks what IMAP does for email (make it live "in the cloud", and > be remotely accessible & usable by a wide variety of clients). However > to fulfil that potential, it seems to me it would ideally need two more > things: > a) syncing of multiple folders (e.g. I have 5 notes folders, 9 contacts > folders, 24 tasks folders) - whereas currently the UIs in both the > phone's sync client and in Genesis-Sync seem to imply > single-folder-syncing only. > b) Support for SyncML built into multiple PIM clients (e.g. Evolution, > Kontact, Outlook, etc.), in the same way that IMAP comes "as standard". > However, even just having it integrated into one client, such as > Evolution, would be useful for people who seamlessly want the same data > synced on both a laptop & desktop, or work machine & home machine. > I think one of the issues/problems with this is much the same as the problems one sees with IMAP. That protocol isn't tightly enough defined so each client/server pair acts slightly differently. I have tried to use IMAP on and off over the years but I always find that the implementations of different mixes of IMAP server and client are such that, for me at least, it's not a viable solution. It's *fine* if you only ever use one client and one server but otherwise it's still not quite there yet.
I believe that SyncMl is in the same sort of place. You only have to look at the differences you found (and I did too) synchronizing a Nokia phone to Evolution via different servers - myFunambol, ScheduleWorld and a funambol installation of one's own. If you then add in a requirement for different clients to work as well and you have a very difficult to solve mattrix of requirements. > Of course, my perspective is entirely from that of a end-user, I have no > idea any whether of this is actually possible, and the amount I know > about the technical details of SyncML and it's capacities and > limitations would not even fill the back of a postage stamp :-) > > > I wonder why you didn't find estamos.de first. It's the first hit for > > "syncevolution". Probably you searched for "syncevolution Ubuntu". > > I'm pretty sure that "syncevolution Ubuntu" is exactly what I searched > for, hence the wrong page :-) Updating the > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SyncEvolution is probably a good idea, as it's > not immediately obvious to the reader that it's out of date information. > > > Funambol only supports one address in the current release. A few days > > ago they announced the features planned for 8.0 and support for a > > second > > address is listed. With ScheduleWorld you shouldn't have had that > > problem. > > I tried ScheduleWorld and it seems better for the problems I > encountered. I'd probably recommend this above the My.Funambol site at > the current time for anyone else wanting to try syncing. > Yes, I believe ScheduleWorld is the best server at present but it's a great pity that so much 'tuning' has to be done to get a satisfactory solution. -- Chris Green _______________________________________________ Evolution-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list
