On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Glenton Jelbert <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks for all the great work. Ubuntu 10.4 is the best yet, and they've > been pretty fantastic recently!
Thanks! That is so nice to hear. Everyone working on Ubuntu One cares a lot about Ubuntu and reads all the feedback and comments we can find about our work, even though we don't have time to respond to it all. > I was wondering about the possibility of a Foldershare/Windows Live type > feature, where folders are synced between several computers *without* being > synced to a server. With Foldershare, it only did the sync when both > computers were on-line, but it was completely behind the scenes (not unlike > the current Ubuntu One sync, except with a peer computer instead of a > server). > > Are there any plans afoot to do something like this? I'd love to try to get > involved. I'd love to have this kind of functionality in Ubuntu One, but right now I have more design questions than answers, definitely not anywhere near some concrete plans. In my opinion, there are two reasons for building out this kind of local functionality. One is user autonomy, and one is performance optimization. I want to get to the point where Ubuntu One users have the absolute best of both worlds with autonomy and the convenience of cloud services. Kind of a personal cloud, where you actually have copies of all your data so that if the cloud servers go away or you don't like them anymore, you are not crippled and your systems still work. We have this right now with the CouchDB part of Ubuntu One (contacts, bookmarks, tomboy notes), we ship tools to let you set up your own local CouchDB server to sync with instead of the Ubuntu One server. With files the only thing you have currently is a copy of all your files - if we turn off the Ubuntu One servers sync stops working. Ideally, we could create a local tiered server somehow so that you still get the convenience of syncing and sharing with other people, but also have the option of setting up a local server component (or even better, make it work P2P). The second reason for this kind of work is performance, and I think we'll be working on some of the building blocks for this in the next 6 months. Some possibilities include slicing up files into smaller chunks so that uploads are resumable, and then perhaps checking for nearby peer systems that already have that content chunk before requesting a download from the server. Right now the ubuntuone-storage-protocol is designed to work in more of a star configuration, where each client talks directly to the server. One of the other problems we have in the current design is that control messages are interlaced with content upload/download. I'm very interested in figuring out a next generation design that adds some of these capabilities, but we'll probably go a bit slowly on this because we need to be very careful in thinking about backward compatibility and making sure that we keep the system working smoothly for older clients. -- Elliot Murphy | https://launchpad.net/~statik/ _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntuone-users Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntuone-users More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
