Kamion migration and backup tool

[Ian Monroe]

The complications for Amarok are:
*if your moving to a different computer, you probably wouldn't want to
carry all that much of the amarokrc configuration with you, since
music is going to be in different folders, maybe different sound
settings.
*what you'd really want to migrate and backup is in the MySQL,
PostgreSQL or sqlite database in the statistics table. Thanks to file
tracking we don't have to worry about if the users put the file in a
different location really on different computers.

None of these are unsolvable problems and Kamion looks like a
worthwhile project. :)

For the first point seems like Kamion could be made KConfig-aware and
the settings that should be backed up could be selected in the XML
recipe. This might be complicated in the future by the fact that
recently KDE4 allows you to have multiple configuration backends, but
currently there is just KConfig. Adding a KDE4 kdelibs dependency
would solve that, something to think about.

For the second point scripting would be required.

Ian Monroe

On 10/6/07, Ljubomir Simin <ljubomir.simin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi again,
>
> I'm not sure if I'm supposed to post about non-core issues here, or rather on
> amarok at kde.org. I'll move the discussion there if necessary.
>
> I've recently decided to help the Kamion project [1]. Kamion ("Truck" in
> Serbian language) is the (user friendly) migration tool, it allows to move
> and backup application data and settings.
>
> The idea is simple: application developers provide simple "recipes" - XML
> files which defines resources to be archived. Different kind of resources can
> be defined in one recipe, like application settings and data. Nothing more
> besides recipe is required from application developers.
> Users uses Kamion GUI tool to easily backup and restore their settings.
>
> Personally, I think that the idea is great, and provides a valuable tool for
> both users and developers. Kamion is written in Qt4 with KDE4 in mind, but
> there are some efforts aiming for desktop independence in the future. It
> could be THE desktop migration tool for the KDE and other apps/desktops.
>
> Kamion is in usable state, but we need feedback from application developers.
> Comments and ideas are highly appreciated, please tell us your needs. Some
> future plans includes:
>
>
> * unification for different applications to export same
> data - for example to provide some standard for email programs - how to
> format it's resources so that you could pack the data from KMail and import
> into thunderbird on another installation.
>
> * Scripting - optional pre-packing and post-extracting shell scripts - so that
> they could filter unnecessary data or something.
>
> * Changeable file locations for resources - the developers would be able to
> tell Kamion to search for the file location inside another file (for example
> inside a config file)
>
> * Dynamic resources - so that different accounts in mail programs appear under
> different resources, and not in one common - mail messages.
>
>
> I really believe in this project, and would love to have you guys support it,
> as it will surely ease the further adoption.
>
> PS. As our website is a bit sparse in details, I'm attaching a sample recipe
> for kopete, and a XSD of the recipe format.
>
> [1] http://kamion2.sourceforge.net/
> --
> Ljubomir Simin
> Registered Linux User #351181
> http://counter.li.org