On Wed, 2004-09-15 at 00:41, Havoc Pennington wrote: > On Tue, 2004-09-14 at 13:20 +0100, Stuart Ellis wrote: > > > > Writable shared data stores presumably require some form of > > reconciliation or version control for multiple off-line copies to be > > handled smoothly. I suppose that one solution might be to wrap access > > to a version control system into the standard GUI so that the > > functionality becomes accessible to office workers; another might be to > > use a database-backed system like Storage, which could replicate. <snip> > > A sentiment around the office is that the "merge" concept is impossible > to sanely present to users, and so instead we should stick to "master > copy" and "backups" It would certainly require some very hard thinking - I don't think that anybody has a good answer yet. In most cases it probably isn't really necessary, either. For me it just feels unavoidable for those sets of data with multiple authors. > > For a file share used by multiple users, a simple approach is that they > have a read only copy on their laptop, and it changes to the writable > actual share while they are connected. Or just vanishes while > disconnected, if appropriate. Simplicity is definitely a key virtue here, for both the mechanisms and the presentation. This sounds right to me for most cases. > Just having reliable homedir backup, plus the above UI, would be very > useful and dramatically better than what most people use today. Maybe a > complex merge solution would be even better, but those solutions never > seem to catch on even though they've been implemented many times... I agree that integrating paired sync or backup really would be of immense benefit. It can be done with the technology available, and done better than the implementations in other OSes, as well. So I just jumped ahead to the next problem along... As I see it, as technical users we end up using both rsync and CVS because we need both approaches. Or replacing CVS with Subversion, or tla... There also now seems to be a few products attempting to bring version control and file repositories to the nontechnical (IBM Workplace, MS Sharepoint and Volume Shadow Copy). I doubt that they will get it right, and usability will probably be the biggest failing. But there is clearly a present need to manage sets of files with multiple authors and remote or disconnected clients. The popular methods of file sharing right now are pretty awful for meeting those requirements. This feels like the next logical consideration once you talk about client machines as interchangeable hosts for data that are capable of disconnected operation. The amazing thing about Stateless Linux as described is that it can obviously be done; people on this list can go straight to talking about the detail because we know that the necessary fundamentals exist. The issue of data sharing is the one area where I couldn't think of any available technology that actually works well.
