
Git-annex assistant: Like DropBox, but with your own cloud - urza
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-like-dropbox-but-with-your-own
======
sciurus
Joey blogs his progress on git-annex assistant in detail at <http://git-
annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/>

Here's a post from his personal blog that hints at how he can afford to work
on this project for a year on only $20,000-
<http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/notes_for_a_caretaker/>

~~~
northband
I love it. Back in 1999-2001 I used to live in a shack on top of a mountain in
Boone, NC which is less than an hour from Bristol.

Our network was driven by dual US Robotics courier modems bridged until the
local phone company gave us DSL (we were located close to the switching
facility).

There were 3-4 of us devs living there. We cut our own wood, got our water
from a natural spring, drank lots of coffee and local beer, and coded 24/7.

Its there where I started to really grow as a dev because there was little
distraction and the enviro was very inspiring.

My goal is to get back to the mountain (move my family) and focus on writing
good code.

~~~
yesimahuman
That sounds wild, you should blog about this if you haven't, I'm sure many
here would love reading more :)

~~~
northband
Thanks guys - I think I will blog about it - that'd be cool.

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tomku
Very cool, but I suspect that making it user-friendly and slick will end up
being much more difficult than implementing the actual functionality was.

Edit: I have another question/concern, does the implementation in Haskell mean
that the end product will have a runtime dependency on GHC or the Haskell
Platform?

~~~
mikeplus48
No, ghc produces statically linked binaries by default (-dynamic if you don't
like that).

~~~
egonschiele
This is true, but then those static binaries tend to be very big (50+ mb).

~~~
dons
50M!? 5 would be more likely, assuming stripping. As opposed to 5k with dyn
libs.

~~~
joeyh
I'm up to 15 mb :/

------
dt7
This seems quite similar to SparkleShare: <http://sparkleshare.org/>

Edit: Oops, SparkleShare is mentioned on the page. Looks like this will work
better with larger files. He does mention that SparkleShare is a GUI and not
'just a folder', although in my experience it is 'just a folder', like
Dropbox.

------
Johngibb
This sounds similar in practice (not implementation) to AeroFS [1] which is a
peer to peer syncing service. Just make one of your peers something cloud-
based and reliable.

Very interesting space!

[1] <https://www.aerofs.com/>

------
rlpb
I'd love to hear Joey's answer on this question: why Haskell?

~~~
dons
He had said previously:

Joeyh: "One (git-annex) is a large-ish, serious work, and I have been very
pleased with how haskell has made it better, even though there was a learning
curve (took me two weeks to write the first prototype, which I could have
probably dashed off in perl in two days), and even though I have occasionally
been blocked by the type system or something and had to do more work.

One concrete thing I've noticed is that this is the only program where I have
listed every single bug I fixed in the changelog -- because there have been so
few, it's really a notable change to fix one!"

------
rsync
rsync.net will fully support Git-annex (it was brought to our attention a
month or so ago by our friend Jason Scott).

We're excited about this project.

------
jt2190
At first glance, OwnCloud seems to be similar:

<http://www.owncloud.org/dev/sync-clients/>

(That said, git-annex assistant looks very cool.)

~~~
urza
Yes they both looks good. git-annex has all the advantages of git, but is
lacking windows support, whereas ownCloud is has better multi-OS support,
because thanks to Qt it runs on Win/Mac/Linux, but uses csync as synch
algorithm..

~~~
dwiel
git-annex doesnt currently support windows, but changing that is on the
roadmap provided on kickstarter

------
Gustomaximus
This is similar to the features Opera launched in 2009

<http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2009/06/16/>

------
timtadh
I didn't look closely at the kickstarter page but I use gitdocs[1] which is
basically works like dropbox but syncs to a git repository. It works ok for my
(light) usage.

[1] <https://github.com/bazaarlabs/gitdocs>

[edit] It looks like git-annex solves the large binary blob problem with git
(which I don't think gitdocs does) so maybe they could be integrated?

------
jblemee
Not a new idea <https://github.com/jcheype/GitBox>
<https://github.com/jblemee/GitBox-Desktop>

~~~
justjohn
Nothing is ever a new idea, it's all about implementation and marketing. It
will be interesting to see how git-annex assistant compares to the other
products linked here when it's finished.

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omgmog
This seems to do what Sparkleshare does, except Sparkleshare uses Github -
<http://sparkleshare.org/>

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rjzzleep
i'm not sure if git is the right thing to choose to version big binary files.

~~~
tomku
The project is based on git-annex, which is an extension that treats big
binary files differently. Namely, it doesn't check in the file contents, so
you don't get full-file versioning. You can find out more at <http://git-
annex.branchable.com/>.

~~~
rmc
Technically you can use the SHA backend to git-annex, so the actual file
contents can be tracked by git, giving you "full file versioning". It's just
not checked into git.

------
BruceIV
Maybe this is _really_ juvenile, but does the logo look like a bladder to
anyone else?

