Module proposal: Conduit for GNOME 2.24

[John Stowers <john stowers lists gmail com>]

Hey Guys,

On behalf of the Conduit [1] development team, I would like to propose
Conduit for inclusion in GNOME 2.24 desktop suite.

* Purpose: Conduit is a synchronization architecture for the GNOME
desktop. It provides an intuitive GUI for synchronizing things and a
DBus interface for external applications to do the same.

* Justification:
Our immediate benefits to the GNOME desktop are very well supported
multi-site photo/upload and sync (from Fspot, eog and folder), tomboy
synchronization to a number of places, file/folder sync (including
intuitive removable volume support, and the ability to do all these
things peer to peer. We also support many more than these listed,
however at the cost of additional dependencies. See below for
clarification.

In implementing these diverse backends, I am confident our abstractions
are sound, and we will be able to grow with the GNOME desktop and
support synchronization with any device you can imagine. Applications
using our DBus interface will get these benefits at no extra cost.

* Dependencies:
  pygtk,
  gnomevfs,
  gnome-python-desktop > 2.22,
  python-gtkmozembed,
  [NEW] pygoocanvas > 0.9.0,
  [NEW] goocanvas > 0.9.0,
  [NEW] Python 2.5 (for network sync support)

* Resource usage:
  GNOME FTP, GNOME SVN, GNOME bugzilla, translations

* Adoption:
  Packaged for all major distros, expressions of interest for more
extensive use by Ubuntu [2], Mandriva [3] and Suse [4]

* Gnome-ness:
  * We support Tomboy note sync and Fspot photo sync. In both cases we
were instrumental in the development of DBus interfaces in the
respective applications
  * We support evolution-data-server through the new python evolution
bindings we contributed to GNOME last cycle.
  * Our file/folder sync uses gnomevfs
  * [WIP] We have developed an eog plugin for photo upload to a number
of sites, directly from within the application
  * [WIP] We have developed a nautilus plugin to enable easy
file/folder sync

* Additional Information:
Our focus for this cycle is the support of mobile devices through both
libsyncml [5] and (python)gammu [6]. This will obviously introduce
additional dependencies on these libraries.
  
We are looking forward to, and will be adding support for GIO/GVFS as
soon as it is available to be used from Python.
  
We also support the following services although support for them comes
at the cost of additional dependencies
  * Google contacts, [WIP] calendar, [WIP] documents (requires
python-gdata [7]) 
  * Backpackit.com (require python backpack [8])
  * Facebook photos (requires pyfacebook [9])
  * iPod photos (requires libgpod [10])

Conduit is translated into a number of languages, and features user help
documentation. However both of these are WIP.

We have had firm expressions of interest from Tomboy and Cheese about
using conduit for Sync and Export respectively. Conduits presence in the
desktop set would make their dependency on us for this functionality
more palatable.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts

John Stowers

[1] http://www.conduit-project.org
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SyncIntegration
[3] http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_What%27s_New
[4] http://www.novell.com/brainshare/general-sessions-2008.html
[5] http://libsyncml.opensync.org/
[6] http://cihar.com/gammu/python/
[7] http://code.google.com/p/gdata-python-client/
[8] http://bleu.west.spy.net/~dustin/projects/backpack/
[9] http://code.google.com/p/pyfacebook/
[10] http://www.gtkpod.org/libgpod.html