[tomboy-list] Tomboy Synchronization Update

[Boyd Timothy]

Sweet!  Thanks Sandy for keeping everyone here "in the know".

It's not the best quality video, but I've uploaded our lightning talk (demo):

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3281629338923781895&hl=en

Enjoy!

-Boyd

On 7/1/07, Sanford Armstrong <sanfordarmstrong at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Tomboy fans,
>
> As you may have seen on Boyd's blog [1], I visited Boyd at Novell HQ
> in Provo to help work on Tomboy Synchronization during Novell's Hack
> Week [2].  We made awesome progress, and we feel pretty confident that
> sync will go into the next stable release.  I've broken this update
> into the following sections:
>
> 1. What is Tomboy synchronization?
> 2. What can I expect to see in the next release?
> 3. Technical details
> 4. What about Conduit, etc?
> 5. What about note sharing?
>
>
> 1. What is Tomboy synchronization?
>
> With the Tomboy synchronization feature, we aim to solve a very
> specific user problem: one person running Tomboy on multiple computers
> who wants to keep all their notes in sync.  It is very common for a
> user to have (for example) a desktop and a laptop, with no obvious way
> to move notes back and forth between them.  Our solution is providing
> 100% note data synchronization between these computers.
>
> We know some people are interested in more sophisticated sync
> scenarios, like two users syncing a subset of their notes.  This is
> certainly doable, and the work we've done on sync would allow this to
> happen via an external app, but there are currently no plans to add
> these advanced sync features to Tomboy 0.8.0.
>
>
> 2. What can I expect to see in the next release?
>
> If you watch Boyd's demo and check out the screen shots, that's a
> pretty good indication of what we plan to deliver.  You will be able
> to synchronize all of your notes via a central shared location.  This
> location may be an SSH share, a WebDAV share, or *any* mount point on
> your local file system.
>
> We will provide extremely simple support for conflict resolution
> during sync.  Conflicts include modifications to the same note on
> different computers, creating different notes with the same title on
> different computers, etc.  Our current solution here is to prompt the
> user to either delete or rename the local version of the note.  Any
> ideas on how to make this is as brain-dead easy as possible would be
> appreciated!  :-)
>
>
> 3. Technical details
>
> All syncing is actually done via local mount points.  In the cases of
> WebDAV and SSH shares, we utilize FUSE filesystems (wdfs and sshfs,
> respectively) to mount the shares locally.  We then use the same sync
> backend to perform filesystem operations for sync.  FUSE support is
> detected at run time.
>
> We will be writing up more details about our sync implementation as
> soon as we get a chance.  For now, feel free to play with the code in
> the tomboy-sync branch (though of course back up your notes before
> trying sync, as it's not bug-free yet).
>
>
> 4. What about Conduit, etc?
>
> Conduit [2] is a cool program that helps you sync between various
> different applications and web services.  It has support for Tomboy,
> allowing you to sync between Tomboy and Evolution, GMail, BackpackIt,
> and other apps/services.  So why aren't we just throwing out support
> behind Conduit (or another sync framework)?
>
> Basically, we felt that Tomboy note synchronization is a must-have
> feature for 0.8.0, and Conduit is still new and we haven't had much
> time to test it.  We wanted our users to have a sync solution that had
> no risk of data loss (which can happen when a note moves to an
> application or web service that is not aware of Tomboy-specific
> features), and we wanted it to work right out of the box.
>
> That being said, Conduit is an awesome project, and the work we have
> done (which includes patches from the Conduit team!) will enable
> Tomboy to work even better when syncing via Conduit.  So our users
> will have the option of a more advanced sync solution with Conduit if
> that interests them.
>
>
> 5. What about note sharing?
>
> Some of you may be thinking "I only have one computer...I don't care
> about sync, I care about sharing my Tomboy notes with my friends!"
> Well, this isn't something we're adding natively to 0.8.0, but the
> work we've done for synchronization makes sharing a much easier
> problem to solve.  In fact, we now have support for easily sharing
> notes to friends on a local network with Giver [3][4], another cool
> Hack Week project.  The interaction here is so incredible...I wish my
> computer was powerful enough to record a demo of how awesome it is.
> You just drag a note to your friend's face in Giver, and when they
> accept the note it just pops up as a new note in their Tomboy!  It's
> super cool.
>
>
> Well that's everything.  We'll send out more updates as sync
> progresses.  Remember, if you try out the code in the tomboy-sync
> branch, BACK UP YOUR NOTES FIRST.  We will bring the code over to
> Tomboy trunk as soon as we feel comfortable trusting everyone's notes
> to it.
>
> We really look forward to hearing any ideas our users or developers
> might have for making Tomboy Synchronization really rock!  If you're
> interested in hacking on this (there is still some work to do), let us
> know.  We will put up some technical documentation on our sync
> implementation as soon as we get a chance to write it.  ;-)
>
> Best,
> Sandy
>
> [1] http://boyd.musipal.com/2007/06/tomboy-note-sync-demo.html
> [2] http://www.conduit-project.org/
> [3] http://idea.opensuse.org/content/ideas/easy-file-sharing
> [4] http://code.google.com/p/giver/
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