[Kde-pim] Syncronization issue with Akonadi

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Wednesday 31 December 2008, Stephen Kelly wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Imagine an addressbook application which has a list of contacts and a
> contact editing widget on the other.
>
> You are editing the address of the contact when an akonadi monitor
> notifies the application that that contact has changed on the server.
> For example, when you started editing the address it was
>
> 123 Fake Street,
> Silly Lane,
> Essen.
>
> You edit the first line so that it is
>
> 321 Real McCoy Street,
> Silly Lane,
> Essen.
>
> Before you save it, akonadi notifies the application that that
> address is now
>
> 456 Conflict Street,
> Silly Lane,
> Essen.
>
> What is the application supposed to do? Offer a merge dialog?
>
> I think there may be other similar conflict situations. Has anyone
> thought of what applications should do about this yet?

AFAIK each time we discussed this we came to the conclusion that 
handling such conflicts is out of scope for Akonadi. It has to be done 
by the applications because they know much better what the user has 
done.

The applications should probably do the same as Kate/KWrite when 
noticing a file the user is currently editting has changed on disk., 
i.e., the applications should ask the user whether he wants to discard 
his changes or whether he wants to ignore the other changes. Offering a 
complicated merge dialog for a situtation which doesn't occur very 
often is, IMO, overkill.

Maybe it makes sense to allow the user to store his changes in a new 
item (similar to Save As). Then the user could examine the differences, 
make the necessary adjustments and discard the other item. Hmm, this 
could break links of other items to the original item in case the user 
decides to discard the original item instead of his changed "Saved As" 
item. So maybe some kind of merge dialog is the better solution. 
(TortoiseSVN has a pretty good merge dialog but, of course, merging 
text files is trivial compared to merging structured data.)


Regards,
Ingo
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