F-spot Sync + Dbus

[john carr unrouted co uk]

Hi everybody

I'm one of the Conduit devs (see www.conduit-project.org) and I'm writing
to ask for you help. Soon, and before the end of the next cycle, i'm
planning to spend some time improving Conduit support for F-spot. I'm
interested in uses cases for this - i already have a reason or two to do
this for myself - and also some advice from the devs.

To the users:
=============
 * I've got some very basic network code i've been working on that enables
Tomboy and Evolution to sync over the network (to other Tomboy and
Evolution instances). I think this would be really cool for F-spot too.
Think of the guy who was trying to merge his photo db's. He could just
sync the two F-spots together over the network.

 * I personally want iPod photos. Both as a backup, and its cool to be
able to take out your holiday snaps if someone asks about them, don't ya
think? Hopefully the sync can be twoway, for those of you with the iPod
camera adapter.

 * I want to back up my photos to my server over SSH.. I don't know about
anyone else, but the thought of my collection being lost forever in a
fire or if my laptop is stolen.. Ouch! Yet i'm lazy enough to forget to
backup. So Conduit doing a background sync for this would kick ass.

These are some use cases that I have in mind, but i'm interested in what
you think could be sync'd.

To developers:
==============
So I'm planning to work on some patches for F-Spot to give it a dbus
interface to PhotoStore. I've spoken to sde about this and have an idea
from looking at the code of what is needed.

My main "blocker" is i'm not sure of how to do things style wise. Would
the devs prefer it if I create a set of proxy classes that wrap PhotoStore
and Photo, or am I ok to build this directly on to the PhotoStore/Photo
classes. I think i'd prefer to write a proxy type class, similar to how
Tomboy does it.

How much of PhotoStore would I need to wrap to have such a patch accepted?
I want to wrap as much as possible but the search stuff might be tricky. I
won't be sure until i've tried though, the Managed Dbus stuff looks pretty
magic.

Are there any reasons why I shouldn't expose the Added, Updated and Remove
events over dbus?

In your opinion, would it be difficult to split F-spot loading into two
steps? It would be cool if Conduit (and even the likes of Beagle and
Tracker) could use the dbus access without having to "Present" the GUI.
Note that this is a secondary goal - the important thing is that we can
make sync work.

When I have something to show, would you prefer an enhancement ticket as
opposed to posting here?

Is anyone willing to volunteer to be my guide should I get lost in the
bowels of F-spot :-)?

Once I know if i'm ok to go for a wrapper approach I think I could have
something ready pretty quickly.

Thanks for your time
John