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.
Here are some things we worked on:
We added a function that lets the program that uses the csync library pass arbitrary module parameters to the backend module. That way its more easy to steer the behaviour of the ownCloud modules from the calling app.
Error handling was improved, ie. if an http error happens, csync works errno based error reporting. We added custom errnos because not all error cases with http can be mapped to system errnos.
Formerly the csync ownCloud module was spooling files through an additional temporar file on client side. That step is skipped now which results in performance improvements as well as in more clean code.
We were able to reduce the number of HTTP requests that go over the wire even more. For example to check if there are changes on server side, now there is exactly one http propfind required. Also if files have to be synced, we could save some HTTP requests by improving caching of some requests.
Andreas recently changed the logging system in csync upstream master branch. We merged that back and now do not longer need the log4c framework. One build dependency less and a nice new logging framework.
Other bugs were fixed, such as a potential crash if a folder as deleted during it is synced, SSL handling shortcomings, code streamlining in handling compressed data streams and more.
We finalized a patch that uniforms the utf8 representations of characters over all platforms. That will fix problems we saw especially with MacOS and special filenames.
Ah, yes, we also did other things, more related to the ownCloud client. Danimo managed to implement a cross platform filesystem watcher class that is able to fulfill our requirements. That obsoletes polling for changes on the local file system, one of the most popular enhancement requests.
And finally there now is a API in csync thats reports file transmission progress if a callback is installed accordingly. So the client hopefully soon will tell ya what it’s doing for you. Also appreciated I guess…
Last but not least we added code to use QtKeyChain, a cross platform password storage library that stores password encrypted. For example on Linux QtKeyChain connects to kwallet. QtKeyChain was provided by Frank Osterfeld, thanks a lot for that contribution.
Quite some stuff for a short week, note that stuff that fills a short line in this blog can be quite nifty to investigate, implement and test. Not everything is stable, polished and properly integrated but it was a great and productive week. The next release of ownCloud Client will be a nice one.
And sice you can not always work, we had a nice dinner at a very cool italian restaurant. We met with other ownCloud employees located in Berlin, Arthur and Georg. Fun :) And Berlin, yes, a great place to be, but finally I appreciated to arrive back to my snow covered home.
Many thanks to Olivier and Markus for hosting us and for the nice week.