Dropbox and why you should invest in people

Re:Dropbox and why you should invest in people by wisty on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @05:46AM (#2353678)

I don't think dropbox really syncs (i.e. merges documents). It just stores versions, right?

Architecture astronauts tried to build generic diffs and merges, on top of rich documents. Think SVN for Word docs. Then they though about metadata, like bug-reports and other actions. Then you can host the bug report (and the project management system, and the wiki) on top of the synchronization architecture.

Dropbox, at its core, just keeps your files and 30 days of history.

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Re:Dropbox and why you should invest in people by crocowhile on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @05:55AM (#2353693)

What do you mean? Dropbox syncs files amongst the computers you own and that is the most used feature I think. It is a sync. (In fact before using Dropbox I was using rsync over ssh.)

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Re:Dropbox and why you should invest in people by wisty on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @06:51AM (#2353789)

Alice has a file. Bob has a copy. They both edit it, and want the edits to be synchronized (by some sort of smart merge). That's the over-engineered syncing solutions Joel is talking about. Not just rsync.

Sorry about the semantics ... I should have been clearer.

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Re:Dropbox and why you should invest in people by js2 on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @07:53AM (#2353924)

It syncs, but punts on conflict resolution.

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Re:Dropbox and why you should invest in people by epochwolf on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @08:29AM (#2354005)

Which is correct behavior, trying to implement generic file synchronization is doomed to fail.

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Re:Dropbox and why you should invest in people by wisty on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @08:34AM (#2354019)

Yes, but that doesn't stop people trying.

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