[Owncloud] Hoping to contribute as part of University degree

[Jon Spriggs]

I'm no low-level developer - I can barely keep up with my own
projects, but I think that having something DVCS based will give you
more power in the long run. Each time you save, it's going to try to
write to the WebDav service (if you're using copy-on-write). If you
use the DVCS model, then your users will have the ability to work
off-line (imagine being on a bus, train, or aeroplane) and when they
get network access back, they can commit.

There's no reason why we couldn't implement a DVCS style of
versioning, but then if you treat any WebDav uploads as a commit
against the head, then any diffs that appear in DVCS can be patched
against the versions coming in against.

Look at Sparkleshare for a versioned file-storage service using Git as
it's revision-engine, or Ubuntu 1 for a CouchDB based service.

Bear in mind, one major benefit of ownCloud right now is that it's a
simple WebDav service with plugins. If we have a DVCS engine on top of
that, then we would probably need to look at writing native
applications for the various platforms the project wants to support,
although Git now supports HTTP access, so there's probably no reason
why ownCloud couldn't implement a Git interface, perhaps?

Wow, now isn't that a picture I've just painted?!

LOL I really hope this comes about. I'd love to have a cross-platform
storage service, that I can use to replace my reliance on DropBox
because of it's Android, Linux and Windows support, but that doesn't
need a constant network connection (which is what DVCS brings to the
party)!
--
Jon "The Nice Guy" Spriggs

On 7 October 2011 18:32, Craig Roberts <craig0990 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi Florian and Robin,
>
> Thanks for the suggestions - I somehow managed not to think about
> metadata/versioning while I was trying to come up with ideas.
>
> The versioning functionality takes my interest, I've been looking into
> the issues most distributed version control systems have with large
> files, as well as the DeltaV extension to WebDAV (RFC 3253).
>
> What I'd like to know is how ownCloud is expected to behave -
> apparently SVN provides a WebDAV/DeltaV compatible web server, which
> makes it a check-in/check-out, centralised model. Alternatively, a
> DVCS-based implementation (either Git or something similar) would
> allow merging between each remote (i.e. desktop/laptop/ownCloud
> server).
>
> Should I be looking at implementing DeltaV, either into ownCloud or
> directly upstream into SabreDAV; or would it be better to look into a
> distributed VCS with some big file extensions and concentrate on
> providing an intuitive interface for managing it all?
>
> Thanks,
> --Craig
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