On Friday I arrived back from Berlin where I had the pleasure to work with my great colleague Danimo and our friends from Woboq, Markus and Olivier, in the Woboq Headquarter in Berlin Kreuzberg for a week. We thought that it might be fun to work together on csync, our sync engine under the hood of the ownCloud client. There were some issues that should be fixed and on the way we cleaned and improved quite some code in csync....
I spent the last weekend in Prague at the openSUSE conference 2012. It was a great opportunity to visit the wonderful city of Prague and meet old friends from the openSUSE community and get a bit more involved into openSUSE again. I gave a talk about ownCloud on Saturday where I tried to show some technical details. That could have gone even deeper was the feedback some people gave me so I promise to show more of for example app development next time....
Along with todays ownCloud 4.5 release we released the new ownCloud Client 1.1.0 with a new syncing concept. This blog will shed some light on the details. I apologize, it’s a long read. Time Issues ownCloud Client versions 1.0.x worked with csyncs traditional way of using the file modification times to detect updates between the two repositories that should be synced to each other. That works fine and conforms to our idea to ideally not use any other metadata in syncing than what the file system has anyway....
as you might know, ownCloud uses the Open Build Service (short OBS) to produce and distribute the binary packages for the various distributions we want to support. The OBS is a great system as it does not only build for various Linuxes but also lets the users download the binary packages utilizing a huge mirroring infrastructure. All for you, all for the good of free software. And there is even more: OBS offers a nice download page which can either be embedded into a projects webpage or be linked from it....
Akademy 2012 isn’t far any more and I just registered for a BOF at this years Akademy in Tallin. It will take place in Room 419 on monday, July 2nd, 2012 at 10:30. Subject of the BOF will be the integration between KDE and ownCloud. As onwCloud originated from the KDE project we should meet and think together again how we can provide useful integration for the users combining the power of both technologies....
It’s release day today: This morning, ownCloud 4 was released! With a very cool set of features it’s even more useful and again more fun to use. Along with that I am happy to let you know that we also released the ownCloud Desktop Client in version 1.0.2. It is a maintenance release with a couple of important bugfixes, such as the cross platform filename encoding problem I was already talking about....
Writing cross platform code is easy nowadays. You use Qt, implement stuff, and it compiles and runs almost everywhere. I also enjoy that in my work on the ownCloud desktop client. But, as you know, there is the other part in the client called csync. Its the syncing engine underneath. And that does not build up on Qt, but is plain C. Adventure starts here. This bug took me on an interesting (well…) journey into what cross platform really means....
This week we prepared another ownCloud sync client (oCC) release for you. oCC is released together with csync 0.50.5, the underlying library on which shoulders oCC stands. Find packages for your distribution. Only a couple of weeks after the first release we could come up with a quite long changelog, larger than for a maintainance release. First and foremost, oCC now supports SSL connections and does not store passwords any more, well, in clear text in a config file....
[caption id=“attachment_48” align=“alignleft” width=“92” caption=“Build it!”] [/caption] people were asking how to set up a development setup for the syncing client we are working on to sync local files to ownCloud and vice versa currently, work title mirall. While a website about it is not yet finished, I try to summarize it here. There are some hacks here and there but that’s how I do it today. It will improve over time....
Busy times currently as we’re heading to releases of ownCloud. The syncing client I am working on plays a role for that and thus I was doing a lot of work on csync upstream and mirall to get that going. Meanwhile I succeeded to get mirall running under Win32, it was quite an experience for me digging through the mud of various compilers and environments and the different understandings of C standards, especially since csync is plain C and never run on Win32 before....