Re: Dogfood servers now up

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Sanford Armstrong wrote:
> How does this fit into the grand scheme of the online desktop?  Tomboy
> can't be the only app that wants to store real data (not just
> configuration data) out there.  I know Mugshot is meant mostly to bind
> existing services together, but how is a small free software project
> supposed to find the resources to offer a stable and performant web
> service to a large number of users?  The answer for the Online Desktop
> can't always be "store your data in an existing cool (proprietary)
> service".  GNOME is going to have to become a service provider.

I agree, the only way to make service-provider-dependent features usable 
is to have at least a default provider available, though people can also 
host their own.

What is your order of magnitude on the size of someone's Tomboy notes?
If they aren't very big then let's just try to get it going now. I can 
help on the server side if you can point me to some sense of what the 
data looks like, relevant source code, etc.

Maybe we should also consider a web page to access your notes, which 
would let you get to them from a random internet kiosk and the like.

For a small quota we can support quite a few users without too much 
trouble. Think a reasonable hard drive (200G) divided by a 10M quota.

For a larger quota, one way we could approach it is that the server 
offers you a choice of storage providers. In implementation, this could 
mean that if I want to be a storage provider I either set up an S3 
account or I provide the similar http-like S3 API on my own server - 
maybe just support sftp. Then users on online.gnome.org (or another 
instance of the same code) choose the storage provider they want to use.

The server code already has the basic glue to speak WebDAV and forward 
it to S3, though it isn't enabled through any usable UI.

This is only one possibility, though. We might have better ideas later.

Something to consider, on the server we can store files or we can store 
database tables. They both have some advantages, with the database 
tables we can do fine-grained change notification over XMPP and it's 
easier to support a web view and web editing. With files it's easier to 
deal with "large" (exact definition fuzzy) data.

Havoc