Re: Starting to contribute.

["Govind Salinas" <govindsalinas gmail com>]

On Jan 16, 2008 4:55 PM, Colin Walters <walters redhat com> wrote:

On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 20:03 +0000, John Carr wrote:
> Thank you for your response Colin.
>
> Is your position on this likely to change?

It's certainly possible...I'd love if online.gnome.org had tons of
features.  It's just that we need more work (e.g. encryption, a backup
story) to get to the point where we can support real data.

I may be talking out of my ass here since I am just starting to look at the situation, but if you will indulge me...

I mentioned this in another response.  I don't think backup is necessary, unless you are saying the OD server (data) is not backed up at all.  Even then, each machine that OD syncs to is potentially a backup (I admit this is not the most robust solution).  Also, I don't think that the encryption is not something that the OD server needs to concern itself with.  The user/client are probably the ones best suited for deciding what data needs to be encrypted and there exist many strong encryption libraries that are available to the clients.  In fact, if the server never saw private data in clear text at all, I think that would be the best thing.  Now, it would be useful if the mugshot server could host the encryption key in a secure manner, but that is a different issue (and one I would be delighted to look at, I'm a closet cipher-punk).  Also, a standard method of doing the encryption would probably help the contributors.  I also have some ideas about what data should be synced under what circumstances, such as maybe I don't want to sync some of my todo list item saying "get rid of that loser job" to my work machine and both are running under the same OD user.  But I do want to sync everything else.  I think I am getting ahead of myself tho.

> If not then perhaps your
> plans for online desktop need to remove the Tomboy case study (Sprints
> page of live.gnome.org) as it gives the wrong impression about the
> scope of online desktop...

I think it's still in scope.

> Or to put it another way - we already speak to most of the interesting
> parts of the desktop and to lots of cool webservices. We thought
> online desktop was a natural extension of that kind of work but have
> clearly missed its scope by quite a wide margin... So right now i'm
> not sure exactly what I could sync to online desktop, and why thats
> any better than syncing to any other webservice.

Right, conduit's "rsync" approach doesn't conflict with
online.gnome.org.  We're trying to bake storage of certain data like
preferences into the OS by default to a primary server, whereas Conduit
lets you do a lot more but you have to put more pieces together.

One thing that I would like from OD is to NOT have a dozen different place where I need to sync my data to.  Retaining the ability to host some data on another service, is something that I like. For instance, I like the services provided by rememberthemilk.com, so I may choose to host ( some ) of my info there.

Anyways, I know this is a lot to ask, especially since I have yet to contribute anything, but I would be OK with working on any part that does not involve backup (since that is more about money, resources and server access). 

Thanks,
Govind.