Re: Online Desktop integration ideas

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Alexander Boström wrote:
> I thought OD really wasn't at all about moving the home directory to a 
> server, but about making the desktop integrate nicely with the services 
> that are already out there. But both concepts are very much worthwhile. 
> It might be good for everyone to keep the difference in mind, though.

I was thinking of both (though I would not say moving homedir to server, 
more like "smart and automatic backup/restore of some key pieces of data 
we know about")

I do feel "work well with Flickr" is superior to "sync my folder of 
photos rsync-style with a server" but there are still some advantages to 
backing up the assorted little thingies like .emacs that don't have and 
will never have an existing service associated with them.

Not sure we have to have a grand unifying principle so much - it's more 
to do with the demo we showed at guadec for example, creating a guest 
account and having the new account contain "your stuff"

The file-backup kind of stunts are because we don't have any other way 
to deal with certain apps, like Emacs or bash, and we have some of "your 
stuff" associated with those apps.

> Network filsystem. Can be slow, but adding a smart cache can help a lot.
>
> Sync it. Like unison. Disadvantage: Doesn't work if the local storage is 
> smaller than the server space. And it takes a while download it all to a 
> new device.
>
> A layered filsystem.

My favorite is kind of a fourth option here: don't be generic.

A generic filesystem that magically syncs everything saved to it tends 
to be a research problem, and perhaps not what people want anyway. I 
don't want to sync things like .fonts.cache or .esd_auth or 
Thunderbird's IMAP cache or the Firefox web cache.

Syncing a set of known pieces of data, on the other hand - with possible 
special cases for each one - that's easier.

Another thing I'd throw out there is that any solution with "conflict 
resolution" dialogs is probably a loss. Often there's some 
domain-specific automatic merge algorithm if merging is necessary, or in 
a given domain we feel comfortable saying "most recent just wins," or 
whatever; but we can special-case stuff, rather than trying to solve it 
generically for whatever crap is in someone's homedir.

This file-sync type approach is more to mop up loose ends, many of them 
hacker-oriented such as Emacs, while the nicest user experience is in 
not having local files in the first place a la Google Reader, GMail, 
Flickr, Facebook, etc.

Havoc