[Tfug] OSS equivalent of M$ FolderShare?

[Rich]

On Sep 13, 2007, at 11:01 am, Robert Hunter wrote:

>> You have three obstacles:
>> 1. file syncing
>> 2. file content syncing
>> 3. Firefox knowing that its prefs/bookmarks have changed
>
> Right, but there is a little more...  for true concurrency, you  
> would need some form of locking to manage readers and writers.  I  
> don't think version control would work well for this -- at least  
> not without hacking the mozilla source.
Why not? Version control does your locking and management. It seems a  
plugin could work.

> These solutions would work in a "one-user-at-a-time" scenario  
> ( i.e., if Angus wanted to sync his profile between his home and  
> work machine ).
Hm. I'm not convinced that it couldn't be used. I must give it a  
shot :-)

> I, too,  keep many of my configuration files in svn.  However, as I  
> stated previously, if what he is looking for is concurrent access,  
> he will need something more.  See some of the links from my  
> previous post.
Good info, yes, but all require hacking the sources.

The direction they seem to be heading in is a "registry" style hack  
-- using a db backend. That's bad for two reasons:

1. you can't tweak things with a text editor
2. you can't *fix* things with a text editor

Everything would then have to be done via a Mozilla preferences editor.

If we're going to completely replace the preferences, I'd favor  
something more like MacOSX's Property List (plist) files. This has a  
number of advantages:

1. Every preference read and write action is abstracted through a  
system call. There's also a "defaults" program to edit these  
preferences at the command line. There's also a "Property List  
Editor" program, for editing the files directly.
2. plist files are either XML or binary. Programs don't care which.
3. There are three levels of locality: user, system, and network.  
Write access depends on privileges.

What it *doesn't* do is abstract the locality of the user account  
from the locality of the preferences. You log into a local account,  
you get local prefs. You log into a network account, you get network  
prefs.

However, this type of architecture would seem to be a better basis  
than anything else that's been suggested.

R.