Owncloud

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. Apart from that big blocker a couple of smaller, but annoying problems were fixed. Also the GUI was polished, text changes here and there and a new icon set that looks more cool and more like ownCloud. ...

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.It is about a complex thing like filenames containing special characters, my favorite example is the directory “Übergröße”. Directories and files like this could not successfully be synced with the latest client. ...

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. Still there is no strong encryption for the password in (as that’s a non trivial if not impossible thing) but its not clear text any more, so accidents should not longer happen. For those who really care and put security over convenience there now is the option to not store the password at all but provide it at startup. The whole password storage will get more attention soon, I did some work on that already, also using kwallet, more on that in another post. ...

[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. Note that this is about a real development setup, not for a production build. ...

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]. ownCloud has a WebDAV interface, and its used for this. Csync requires the the implementation of a couple of POSIX functions such as opendir, readdir, closedir, stat and these kind of things. I did that using WebDAV equivalents. ...