csync

Last week Andreas did an upstream release of the file synchronization software csync. Frequent readers know that csync is the sync engine that is used in the ownCloud client, so this is a very important and special release for us. The new release contains a lot of features and changes me and my collegues worked on during the last 18 month: First we added the ownCloud module to csync upstream, so that csync now is able to sync local directories to an ownCloud server....

here is something new and eye candy in the ownCloud Client, so let me show a bit of what we have worked on recently. Many users of the ownCloud Client were asking for sync progress information, in fact there was none at all until today which is a bit boring. The reason why we hadn’t it was simply that csync, which is the file synchronizer engine we use, did not have an API to hand over progress information of an actual up- or download to higher levels of the application....

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....

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....

[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....

It has been a busy week where I was working on the ownCloud Desktop sync client. As described in my last post this will be based on a csync module to handle ownCloud as well as mirall, a Qt based desktop client to sync. That involved basically three things: A csync module, a patch in ownCloud and work on mirall. For csync, there needs to be a module that handles the connection to ownCloud, for code see [1]....