UDS: Common Everything
Today there has been a lot of talk about common functionality that attempts to replace lots of existing replicated functionality.
When you have a problem that everyone has to solve, it’s worth considering making a standard version available which all programmers can take advantage of. For instance, every program can take advantage of files, files are so important that they usually form a core part of many programming languages. But could you imagine a system where each program writes data to the disk in it’s own way?
Common Printing Interface
The Linux Foundation is working on a common printing interface which allows all programs to utilise this single and may I saw awesome interface. One that will hopefully be used via dbus (most things are going this way) by all applications that want to print, this will move printing up a step in design and coherence.
Common Contacts Data Store
The Canonical Online Services team appear to be heading up a move towards having a local content database using CouchDB. In this they would like to store contacts and discussions today were around all the considerations of the system. Obviously there are already lots of projects attempting to solve these set of problems, some on KDE and some on Gnome; but the hope is that this system will be a unified way of talking to the system of contacts and hopefully reproduce the ease of intergration and functionality available in the Apple system.
The big functionality improvements other than common access to data will be the ability to share your contacts over the online services.
I expect (although I’m being totally speculative) that if the contacts development is successful that the system will be expanded to include other databases. I’d like to see meta data, calendar and note systems being brought into a shared infrastructural system.
Thoughts?
Tags: uds, uds-karmic
Love the new motto!
I’d rather have common cut & paste functionality before anything else is worked on.
> Obviously there are already lots of projects attempting to solve these set of problems
Evolution data server already solves this no?
> Obviously there are already lots of projects attempting to solve these set of problems, some on KDE and some on Gnome; but the hope is that this system will be a unified way of talking to the system of contacts
Yep, and this is what every new framework tries to achieve and never does. The way to consolidate is not to introduce another system into the mix.
> I’d like to see meta data, calendar and note systems being brought into a shared infrastructural system.
Tracker tried to achieve this “lets store everything in the same database” idea and then realized that no application developers want this. So instead you index the data.
@Adam: I agree with you in principle, but API tends to follow focus for a lot of the existing fixtures. I can’t speak for what the UbuntuOne project is doing specifically with contacts, but I do know that there is a way to fix it by counting these data sets as content (see previous post about Content Libraries)
Hey, there is a new motto! And it’s a cool one, too. ^.^
I just switched to Evolution from Thunderbird, and it’s really a bit advanced for my tastes … it does what I want it to do better than Thunderbird does, and it syncs with my Palm Centro, but it has a lot of options I’ll never use. Just throwing that out if we’re discussing the Evolution data server … I suspect that something more along the lines of Thunderbird or Mail.app would be more usable than this big, humongous program that’s trying to be a drop-in replacement for Outlook.
Data sync with online is important … but what service? Most people use Google Calendar, but they’re not Free / Open-Source, and they could change everything at a moment’s notice and make themselves very hostile to us. Likewise Ubuntu One is not Free / Open-Source either, and getting tied in to that service could result in not being able to leave Ubuntu that easily. Vendor lock-in for a Free / Open-Source platform … scary thought!
Where is my previous comment ?
Held in the queue and marked as spam for some reason.
[...] I like DoctorMo’s motto – Common Everything. [...]
Common this, common that.
I wonder if anyone else saw a little irony here:
(a) forget that not everything is Linux;
(b) forget that not everything is Gnome or KDE;
(c) forget that there are already existing solutions;
(d) forget that there is no single entity that can make such decisions;
(e) rewrite, redesign, rewrite, redesign…. and hope it will lead to a common standard. (The big illusion.)
Not that I am against this. But it will be a sad day when I no longer can print from a xterm running in Fluxbox because of massive kludges that were introduced (of course!) in the name of usability.
It’ll be a sad day when you can’t print in xterm running in Fluxbox because the infrastructure was specific to gnome or kde. I have a huge distaste for functional systems being bound to high level desktop frameworks and I don’t like it when new solutions are created that are not foundations.
Hopefully though, you’ll be involved when the time comes to make sure that your use case not only works, but benefits from the changes.
Hi,
I have published something similar in Ubuntu’s Brainstorm:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17763/
Regards