Finally, and ?only? 3 months overdue I have released Conduit 0.3.0. This release finally marks the end of the sync engine rewrite from the previous release. This also signifies the first time that conduit is simultaneously useful to end users, and application developers as a desktop sync service.
What can it do?
From an end user perspective Conduit has reached the level of being useful. I am currently travelling around Europe for a few months and using Conduit on a daily basis, at least for the task of Synchronization/backup of my photos to Flickr and my home server, Sync/Export of my Tomboy notes to iPod. Other than that Conduit can currently perform the following sync partnerships;
- Two way file/folder sync on gnomevfs volumes
- Two way Tomboy note sync via gnomevfs volumes
- Two way Tomboy note sync via ipod notes
- One way sync of files/folders of photos to Flickr
- One way sync of FSpot tagged photos to Flickr
In the one way sync/export case Conduit is smart in the sense that if a piece of data has not been modified then it will not be synchronized/exported again, it will replace the existing data.
I have also added conflict detection, and a UI for resolving conflicts, including the ability to compare the conflicting data (using gnome-open on the relevant URI).
Desktop Sync Service
I have been talking about the merits of Sync as a desktop sync service for a while, and this release finally marks the point where I can start to add export and sync capabilities to GNOME apps using conduit. In this situation Conduit is exclusively controlled via DBus (independent of the UI). By sharing the same DB we can avoid duplicate data in the synchronization process.
To demonstrate this I modified to Uploadr to call conduit over DBus (and called the resulting app Yaput - yet another photo upload tool) (screenshot). This means that duplicate photos will not be uploaded, updated photos will replace old ones, and it doesn’t matter whether you upload the photos from the Conduit GUI, the DBus interface or $(YOUR_APP_HERE). All that using 10 DBus calls!
Anyway, that’s the plan, and apart from a few annoying known issues, I finally feel like I am on track.
- Download
- Report Bugs
- Good Luck!
Have you considered also using the indexing engine like tracker or beagle to get the list of files to sync? You could probably save some overhead. It’s probably not as simple as that but since both indexers are still immature it might be something to convince them to provide some api to help with synching of apps.
sri
Hi, this is very promising!
One question, how can i configure the gmail account in the email provider ?
I’m so looking forward to this… Rock on !
BTW, maybe it would be a good idea for Conduit to postulate to the J5’s sneak peek release [1] when it is launched.
[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2007-April/msg00265.html
Congrats for your work. We definitely need a rocking synchronisation framework in GNOME!
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