Re: Online Desktop, Tomboy, and user storage

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

john carr unrouted co uk wrote:
>  * Tomboy remains pretty much unchanged (work to have change notifications
> from tomboy are underway anyway - its something Sandy already offered to
> implement for us).
>
>  * Conduit gains a dataprovider plugin that can sync notes to
> online.gnome.org through whatever protocol you suggest. This protocol will
> have to update the Tomboy online data model from the server end.

If I understand this, right now I'm coding an implementation of Tomboy's 
SyncServer and in a Conduit future I would code a Conduit data provider 
plugin.

I think which of those interfaces I write to has very little to do with 
what I'm talking about coding, right? Am I off base here?

The only thing that affects me is whether I code to the SyncServer 
interface in Tomboy now or a comparable Conduit interface.

For now from my perspective the answer is "whichever one Tomboy uses" - 
porting Tomboy to Conduit is a separate project from what I'm doing, I 
would think.

> I think an important thing here is that some people won't want
> online.gnome.org. Personally, i might be tempted to use Conduit to sync
> them to an SSH account or a password protected area of a server I control.

You're comparing apples to oranges. If the desktop has a feature to sync 
my private notes to a private directory, then that's cool and I'm all 
for it.

I'm not working on that feature, though. What I'm working on primarily 
*is* the server-side Tomboy app.

The only way I am looking at touching Tomboy itself is to have a sync 
plugin that happens to sync to this server-side app, *instead of* a 
private data store. The private ssh server is still a configurable choice.

The two features aren't the same or somehow interchangeable, they are 
two different, mutually exclusive ways to store your Tomboy data with 
different advantages.

The implementations could share some file-upload code but that's not 
user visible or interesting, and doesn't affect what users can choose to 
do or not do.

> By integrating Conduit people have that choice, and at the same time we
> don't waste time on multiple sync implementations.

Whether Tomboy uses Conduit is a separate issue from my project, and 
whether online.gnome.org has a server-side app available, though, right?

I mean, Tomboy already supports choosing your sync plugin. If we move 
the choice of sync plugin to Conduit, that's cool, but hasn't changed 
anything about the code I'd have to write.

The situation in Tomboy today, or with Conduit, is that you can sync it 
to a private DAV/ssh filesystem. And what I'm looking to add is that you 
could also sync it with a web app that knows specifically about Tomboy, 
if you choose to do so.

Havoc