[Opensync-devel] OpenSync: fragmentation is harmful

[Patrick Ohly]

On Di, 2011-01-04 at 11:36 +0100, Daniel Gollub wrote:
> On Tuesday, January 04, 2011 10:04:39 am Patrick Ohly wrote:
> > > In summary, I would like to understand why you feel that redirecting our 
> > > efforts to SyncEvolution has any greater chance of success in solving the
> > > hard  problems of syncing.
> > 
> > My own summary, more at a meta level than the details above:
> >       * don't reinvent the wheel, use a mature engine (Synthesis)
> 
> 
> What was your reason choosing SyncEvolution and not OpenSync to adapt to 
> libsynthesis?

Several reasons:
      * libsynthesis did not (and still doesn't) fit into the OpenSync
        architecture because engine and data conversion are closely
        related. Arguably this is necessary, because one needs
        information from the other (capabilities, choosing data
        formats). Refactoring libsynthesis so that it fits into the
        OpenSync plugin concept of formatters, backends and engine would
        have been a major effort, both on libsynthesis and also
        OpenSync. As you know, we discussed it at the time, but despite
        all the emails that we exchanged I still did not fully
        understand the OpenSync design and thus did not pursue this
        further.
      * State of OpenSync. We needed a fully working solution within a
        few months for Moblin 1.0 beginning of 2009. Two years later
        there still isn't a stable OpenSync release, so I think the
        decision was justified. I also don't think that investing work
        into OpenSync would have led to a different result (pure
        speculation, of course - we'll never know).

> Something I'm very interested and also prepared several changes for, and added 
> additional complexity, to introduce libsynthesis in OpenSync. E.g. by making 
> OpenSync independent of xmlformat.

Unfortunately refactoring libsynthesis is still blocking that, and there
is no-one working on it. It simply isn't important enough because
libsynthesis works well for its current usage.

-- 
Bye, Patrick Ohly
--  
Patrick.Ohly at gmx.de
http://www.estamos.de/