libsyncml

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 16:20 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Nathanael D. Noblet wrote:
> > I would appreciate a 0.2X version of opensync. I was actually confused
> > as to why Fedora went with a newer version, as their website states that
> > the only good/stable version is 0.22 and that the next one will be 0.4.
> 
> Well, I'm not sure why the maintainer made the decision, but KDE 4.1 shipped
> with a KitchenSync which required libopensync 0.36. Unfortunately, it
> turned out to be buggy to the point of being unusable, so KDE upstream
> disabled it in 4.2 (the KitchenSync code there has been ported to 0.38, but
> its build has been disabled because of general brokenness), and even if we
> wanted to reenable it (which I don't think we do), we'd need 0.38, so we
> have no use for 0.36 anymore from the KDE/KitchenSync point of view.
> 
> I think the big problem there is that 0.40 has been promised for over a year
> now (it was supposed to be released before KDE 4.0 - when KDE still planned
> to ship kdepim in 4.0, libopensync upstream claimed they'd have a
> libopensync 0.40 release in time for it!) and we're still stuck with buggy
> development versions with APIs changing based on the phase of the moon and
> plugins significantly lagging behind the main package.

Better come out of stealth mode here...

I've been working on this, with the opensync maintainer.

Here's the deal (my credentials in this field are that I maintained the
entire sync stack in Mandriva, which in 2008 Spring and 2009 had
working, 100% graphical synchronization of Windows Mobile, Blackberry
and Nokia devices - see
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.0_Synchronization):

opensync 0.3 is entirely useless. It doesn't work. In the rare cases
where it might possibly work, it is at least equally likely to eat your
data (and your babies). This is explained prominently on the opensync
homepage:

"Releases 0.22 (and 0.2x svn branch) and before are considered stable
and suitable for production. 0.3x releases introduce major architecture
and API changes and are targeted for developers and testers only and may
not even compile or are likely to contain severe bugs. 

0.3x releases are not recommended for end users or distribution
packaging."

Additionally, 0.40 - when it ever arrives - isn't really expected to be
ready for end-user production either. That's likely to be 0.41 or 0.42.

Kevin's right that 0.40 has been planned and promised forever and a day
and keeps getting delayed. Six months ago it was supposed to be coming
now, but it obviously isn't.

Here's the status of what you can actually *do* with opensync:

KDE 4, indeed, shipped with a kitchensync that depends on opensync 0.3.
This is rather irrelevant, however, because what KDE 4 does NOT ship
with is an opensync plugin allowing you to actually synchronize any data
with any KDE 4 applications. kitchensync is just a GUI front end for
opensync, there's no opensync plugin that actually lets you synchronize
contacts or appointments or tasks with the PIM suite in KDE 4. So you
can't do any kind of useful synchronization with any KDE 4 apps with any
version of opensync. Until this is fixed it's not really worth worrying
about KDE at all.

You *can* synchronize rather well with GNOME apps (well, really with
evolution-data-server) with opensync 0.22.

There are plugins for synchronizing with various online services, like
Google Calendar &c, which are in various states of working-ness for
0.22.

For devices, synchronizing with at least Windows Mobile devices (all the
way from at least 2003 up to 6.1, using two different plugins) works
well with a properly set up synce/opensync 0.22 combination.
Synchronizing with Blackberries works well if the opensync plugin for
Barry is available (currently, in Fedora, it's not - the barry package
should be updated to include it). And for Nokias - you can do limited
sync very well with the gnokii plugin, and more sophisticated sync with
the libsyncml plugin on some Nokias (some have broken SyncML
implementations and just don't work right). The latest version of
libsyncml which works with opensync 0.22 is 0.4.6, so we should revert
to that.

As I said, I've been working on this with the opensync maintainer,
Andreas Bierfert. He agrees that we should revert to opensync 0.22 and
has been working on the packages. The current state of his work can be
found at http://fedora.lowlatency.de/opensync-synce/ .

With those packages and a few tweaks (that I've reported to Andreas) I
can get working synchronization out of my Windows Mobile test devices.
I'm not sure if we'll be able to get it into F11 now, though :\

At present, the opensync and synce and syncml related packages in
Rawhide are basically entirely useless, you can't do anything with them.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net