[Freedombox-discuss] Hackfest Fodder: FBX as a DropBox Replacement

[mirsal]

On Fri, 2012-05-25 at 07:11 -0500, Nick Daly wrote:
> So, we've had many requests for a functional-replacement for DropBox.
> Last night, I might've figured out a way to leverage existing tools to
> do this pretty easily.  It needs more thought, and maybe there are
> better ways to do this, but that's what this email thread is all about.
> If we get a working proposal, somebody (or a group of somebodies) can
> run with it during the hackfest, or even before then.
> 
> Dropbox is nothing more than a synced folder, from what I understand.
> We have a lot of tools to synchronize folders.  We have fewer tools to
> do this magically, in the background.  A shared-drive wouldn't work,
> there's no guarantee you're always connected.  This actually looks
> like a really similar problem to distributed-revision control.
> 
> So, if the FBX is the central (always updated) DVCS server, this
> becomes pretty easy: just make your DropBox folder a repository and
> push to the server when you change files.  Nice, but not very
> automatic.  This is where the neatest Mercurial (or Git/Bzr/Mtn)
> Extension ever comes into play: inotify [0].
> 
> inotify notifies the repository whenever files are changed.  If you
> react to that notification by adding new files, committing changes,
> and pushing out to the remote repository (say, every 5 minutes or so),
> then you've just built DropBox.  Oddly, though, it's better: since
> it's a repository, sharing the repository with other folks will no
> longer hose everything if they move stuff around or delete things; you
> can always recover it from previous revisions.
> 
> Can anyone look into making a script that reacts to the inotify events
> and another script that correctly configures a folder to be that sort
> of repository?  The second script is probably easier, it just needs to
> call out ho the inotify extension and the other script.

Isn't that the exact same concept as sparkleshare ?
[http://www.sparkleshare.org]

It is based on git and the client is multi-platform (it uses inotify on
Linux).

-- 
mirsal 
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