On Sun, Jan 09, 2011 at 01:56:53PM +0100, Patrick Ohly wrote: > 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. > I was suggesting that one might write a dedicated application for the desktop end that would simply handle the format of a spcific phone/PDA.
> 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. I guess you hit a problem when one file contains many separate items of data though. > 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. > :-) -- Chris Green _______________________________________________ SyncEvolution mailing list [email protected] http://lists.syncevolution.org/listinfo/syncevolution
