[Opensync-devel] Getting things back on track

[Paul E. <blu...@bl...>]

Hi all,

I think it's plain to everyone that as a project we have a serious problem. 
Things are not moving forward at the pace that we really need them to and have 
not been for quite some time, and this fact has not gone unnoticed by the 
wider community. Every day people complain about the lack of decent 
synchronisation support in open source products, so there is definitely great 
demand - and yet OpenSync is still not ready to solve the problem.

I just read a blog posting [1] by one of the Akonadi developers about some 
discussions that have gone on at their recent meeting. It seems for now they 
have given up waiting for OpenSync and are looking at alternatives. This is 
extremely unfortunate - historically I would have considered the Akonadi 
project to be one of OpenSync's strongest allies.

Now, I recognise that many of us (especially me) have not contributed much to 
the core of OpenSync. The problem there at least from my perspective is that 
few of us have enough information about the vision behind the OpenSync core or 
its internals in order to contribute effectively to it - most of the 
responsibility these days falls on Daniel to answer any questions or to make 
decisions. Daniel, I do recognise that you don't have as much time to work on 
OpenSync as you used to, and nobody would blame you for that; however if the 
project is to go forward then something has to change.

For OpenSync to be successful it needs to become a stable, working 
synchronisation platform that application developers (and users) can rely on. 
I feel like we're about 90% there, but we need to finish the last 10% or all of 
the work that has been done over the last few years will be mostly wasted.

I myself stand fully ready to get involved more closely, but I need guidance - 
documentation that covers the design foremost. In a number of areas I would 
just need a few pointers on where to look, some commentary on how things are 
supposed to work etc. and then I can fill in the blanks and write full 
documentation. Armed with more information about OpenSync's inner workings, 
perhaps more people can help solve the remaining issues and finally get a 
stable release out there.

Let's get back on track!

Cheers,
Paul

[1] http://www.omat.nl/2009/10/17/akonadi-meeting-day-1-discussions-api-
review/