Stories from the land of Rob

So it seems ars technica picked up on Codethink’s little pet project! Obviously the little amount of info on the wiki isn’t enough for everyone who’s interested and enough has changed since the GUADEC talk that I should write a bit here to clarify what’s going on and where we’re going.

First off, we’re currently not using GVFS or FUSE – the core Wizbit component is simply a versioning, distributed object store. The current plan is to later hook up with a metadata service, maybe tracker, and use this to export a FUSE filesystem using the metadata.

This core Wizbit service is just a library with its own api, maybe hooking up to gio streams for ease of use from GLib based applications.

The current focus of our work is solidifying this store and the synchronization between multiple machines. We’re prototyping its use in Tomboy. Karl is also working on making some of these pretty widgets for navigating history work.

We’re not actually using Git underneath, but using our own implementation of concepts from both Git and Bzr. This is for a number of reasons, partially that making a library from git’s code proved more trouble than just reimplementing the concepts (as things like JGit found). Also the nature of the problem is sufficiently different that things like the packed format don’t behave in a suitable way for general file system usage. The work on packing is yet to be started but we’ll probably use Robert Collin’s groupcompress idea from bzr.

I promise we’ll make the wiki a bit better when the code’s stabilised a bit!