Re: [Deja-dup-hackers] GSOC wrapup

[Michael Terry <mike mterry name>]

Thank you Urban for your work, your interface ideas, and any help you
can grant in the future!  I'm glad you learned so much.
-mt

On 18 August 2010 15:18, Urban Škudnik <urban skudnik gmail com> wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> as you know Google Summer of Code came to a finish this Monday and I thought
> that it would be a good idea to post a summary of work done - what was
> accomplished, things that I learned and areas which require additional work
> or improvements.
>
> First, the work done.
>
> As noted, I managed to complete the restoration of deleted files, which took
> the rough first month and a half or so. Personally I wished that this could
> be accomplished faster but as it turned out various small issues brought a
> project to virtual standstill for days (e.g. connecting signals emitted by
> UI designed in Glade, in retrospective completely trivial), but as it turned
> out after I figured them out and got a bit of a feeling with the project
> itself, Vala and development tools development went on rather steadily and
> so by the mid July the first part was mostly finished.
>
> At this point I went to see to Europython to learn a few tips'n'tricks from
> the pros (well, as it turned out, there were more than just a few ;)) while
> Michael reviewed the branch.
>
> After returning, I first started to work on a partial restore but had to
> quickly switch back to "restore missing" branch to fix various glitches with
> code and polish interface to make sure that the thing could be shipped to
> users with Gnome 3 that was, at the time, still planed for release in
> October. Although Gnome later decided to ship Gnome 3 in March, I finished
> the polishing up and can probably say that the thing can be shipped to
> users.
>
> I still owe Michael testcases for my branch because in the last week of GSOC
> I couldn't quite get around testing functions/base that we have and decided
> to throw together the prototypes that I had for partial restore. With
> partial restore I also implemented a cache that will enable us much faster
> retrieval times of file history (which will bypass the need to scan through
> the entire backup history every time).
>
> Current state of partial restore is that we have a working listing of files
> and some basic browsing (if anyone would like to actually restore files, it
> does not require much more work and I can probably add that rather quickly),
> but will require much more work - both partial restore itself and cache (for
> example, I still don't mark if a file was deleted). Currently (after-GSOC) I
> am developing a widget for breadcrumbs that Gnome still doesn't ship with
> (but plans to with Gnome 3 although as far as I know they still don't have
> anyone assigned to this yet).
>
> If that was a short summary of what was accomplished, next thing to look at
> was what I learned.
>
> Besides learning Vala basically from scratch and getting a hang of what can
> be done with it and how and getting a hang for the existing code base that
> Michael produced I also got a lot of knowledge about Gtk (especially in the
> last couple of weeks when I started to look at how to design my own widgets,
> which, as it appears, is sometimes characterized as "pushing it" :>) and,
> while developing cache, a bunch of new knowledge about data structures (B+
> for the win! ;)) and key-value storages (since, at the moment, we are using
> Tokyo Cabinet [1]) with which I haven't worked up to this point since most
> of my past projects never worked with that much data (we are talking about
> million(s) of rows of data on an average computer).
>
> SQLite, which was also considered, was dumped because of a bit of an awkward
> working in Vala and because it appears that it would be much slower than KV
> database. If we decide at the later date that we require more functionality
> switching shouldn't be too hard to do.
>
> As already pointed out partial restore requires much more work and will
> probably not be included in 10.10 but I can see it shaping up nicely for
> 11.04. I hope that in a near future we can also get some more developers on
> board since although it looks as though its a rather simple small
> program/project (personally I have to admit to underestimating it a bit at
> the very start), its development is not that simple. With more developers we
> will also be able to improve on more things and fix more bugs.
>
> One thing maybe to consider is if we can get anyone from duplicity team
> interested in DD as well (following the reasoning that although duplicity is
> great for backups its not great for home users and if you really want it to
> go mainstream DD is just the project to do it). And with DD we have to
> target mainstream above all. It is also true that duplicity itself will
> require a lot more work so I can see convergence of both teams in the long
> run (but maintaining the separation of projects so that people will be able
> to use duplicity without DD).
>
> My personal plan is to stick around the project and help out as much as I
> can but unfortunately I can't make any guarantees after October since school
> will start again and I will probably have to find a part time job. I talked
> a bit with Michael whether or not Canonical can support development efforts
> in the future but it seems that Canonical rarely supports such projects
> either with developers or by hiring contractors. A part of this can probably
> also be attributed to the fact that for the time being they are a lot more
> focused on enterprise sector.
>
> Plans for short term future from me can therefore be shortly summarized in
> finishing partial restore with a proper cache (because duplicity will
> probably not switch to some other archiving format any time soon) and see
> where we need to go on from then.
>
> At least for myself I can say that I had lots of fun and learned a bunch of
> new stuff and hope that I can keep working on these things in the future. I
> also hope I didn't introduce any new bugs to DD's existing code base but
> will of course fix 'em if warranty seal hasn't been broken ;)))
>
> With some luck I hope to see you guys at UDS ;)
>
> Cheers,
> Urban
>
> [1] http://fallabs.com/tokyocabinet/
>
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