cyphactor,
Firstly, thank you for what you are doing, I'm sure that there are a lot of people here who will appreciate some way to sync with Linux apps such as kdepim, evolution etc...
Well, thank you very much for your acknowledgment of all my hard work and efforts in this project.
I just can't help thinking that OpenSync would be a much easier solution, which would provide quicker results, and would be much easier to maintain in the future.
It seems to me, that OpenSync would allow you (and anyone else that helps) to concentrate on the Zaurus side of things and getting that right. No need to worry about all the different PIM software out there as other developers will be able to take care of that. Also the infrastructure etc will all be done for you. And when Evolution changes something, well you should just be able to pick up the new Evolution plugin for OpenSync and off you go. If you continue with this project as-is then you'll constantly have to maintain plugins for all the different PIM software.
The pool of developers working on OpenSync is bound to be greater than those working on Zync, purely because OpenSync will have a much broader user base and hence interest will be naturally higher, does it not make sense to tap into this?
Yes, OpenSync did, from the initial perspective, look like a much easier solution. Such, that would provide quicker results and would be much easier to maintain in the future. However, after looking at the OpenSync code and the way it is setup I decided that it would take me longer and be more painful to implement the Zaurus sync into OpenSync. You are totally correct about the problem with maintaining plugins for all the different desktop PIM applications. This could stand to be a huge problem depending on how much the APIs for integrating with the PIM applications change. Hopefully they won't change very much and it won't be two hard to maintain them.
I also have designed the plugin interface for Zync so that it is very very easy to write plugins.
I do understand your issues with all the dependancies... I think this is one of the biggest problems for a lot of users with Linux... they try to install an app, find it needs x number of dependancies, each of which require x more etc etc... I've been there, and yes it's a pain... it's getting slightly easier with things like APT, but still. I still think that painful as this is though, it's still got to be easier than implementing, effectively, a duplicate of OpenSync...
Just my 2 cents... and caveat here - I don't even have a Zaurus yet!
Good luck with whatever you decide, and when I get my Z I may even be tempted to help...
I am still going to stick with going the direction I am. Beyond the dependency problems, ugly design / lack of code docs / etc, in my opinion (no offense to designers, I just think it could have been done better. I do understand it is in early dev stages but still.), there is also the problem of making it portable. It will be a lot easier for me to tackle my infrastructure and plugin API in making them portable than it would be to do it with OpenSync (that is without adding even more dependencies).
I already have pretty much everything implemented except for all the plugins. The To-Do plugin should be very stable I have been using Zync and the KOrganizer To-Do plugin for a while and have had no problems. I am working on changing some internals in the Zaurus sync protocol implementation to make it better designed and better implemented along with making it more robust so that if a new version of the DTM sync protocol comes out zync will be able to handle it without any code changes.
Let me know when you get your Zaurus, I can use any help in testing or development that you can give.
