Dvcs-autosync: An open source dropbox clone... well.. almost

I found the Dvcs-autosync project on the vcs-home mailing list, which btw is a great list for folks who are doing stuff like maintaining their home directory in a vcs.
In short: Use cases:
  • you have one or more trees you want to maintain under a VCS (because you want vcs advantages like history and whatnot) but it's not worth to spend time comitting manually
  • you want to backup some files transparently
  • you want to share / work with others easily
  • you like the idea of dropbox, but not the closed-source-ness or the vendor dependence
  • you work mainly with relatively small files (or.. read on)
Thoughts:
  • very simple to get started
  • simpler (and imho saner) code and implementation in comparison to sparkleshare
  • bound to the limitations of the dvcs. In case of git: no support for ownership, xattrs, and less suited for bigger files (although git-annex might help?)
  • You cannot store a git repo inside a git repo, I think (i.e. I don't think you can keep a -potentially dirty- git clone in dvcs-autosync)
  • For a real, filesystem-level dropbox-alike coda might be a better option, though I'm not sure how useful that project is right now
If it sounds like something you need, try it out. And contributions welcome.
Next up to the todolist: more clever heuristic for event coalescing, setting up bugtracker.

Add comment