The first beta release is here!
Also, this time there’s some long overdue documentation on how to get started.
Get it here.
The NEWS file:
0.2-beta1 (Sun Sep 5, 2010):
Hylke: Aside from the usual bug fixes and behind the scenes work I mainly added features that increase productivity in the event logs. Not only does it look a lot prettier, each entry in an event log now has a clickable link for easy access to files. It refreshes automatically on new events as well. The Nautilus plugin now has the “Copy Web Link” context menu item, which makes sharing links a whole lot easier.
Great Project!
Thanks for working on this, I guess there’s some demand for a solution like this. I have however one suggestion: I do understand your enthusiasm for git, but I feel like it’s the wrong choice for a binary storage solution. Git will handle the files quite well, but will waste an enormous amount of disk space for it and will become quite slow. Even Linus acknowledges, that git just sucks for huge binary files (http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2006/2/8/200591), not only because of the implementation, but because of the architecture.
In case you’d like to reconsider your choice, have a look at bzr. There’s still a lot to do, in order to make binary files rock, but at least there’s some kind of interest in this issue. Have a look at the discussion on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/70392/is-there-a-distributed-vcs-that-can-manage-large-files.
@Markus Thielmann SparkleShare wasn’t designed to handle large binary files either. The main goal is to make the lifes of designers working on OSS projects easier. So the main use case would be to sync small to medium sized images, vector files, pdf’s and the like.
A lot of projects use Git, so developers and designers can work in the same repository (GNOME comes to mind), and there are web front ends that make managing repositories easy (Github, Gitorious etc.). S
Looking at the discussion you linked to: it’s a year old and there doesn’t seem to be anything concrete. I’ve used Bazaar myself and found it too slow to use. It also introduces a dependancy on Python. The only web frontend (correct me if I’m wrong) is Launchpad. Which is the worst interface for project management I’ve ever seen.
Do you have a comparison of how efficiently Git and Bazaar store binary files? It would be interesting to read.
Lastly I’d like to say that _any_ (D)VCS sucks for storing huge files.
How stable is SparkleShare? I.e. can I trust relevant files to it?
I’m very enthusiastic about SparkleShare, and I will be testing the soonest possible. One quick question: is it easy to use it from command line? This would be very important for me…
@Leonardo Fontenelle you can.
@vrypan yes, it has a command line option. Just use “sparkleshare start –disable-gui”
But you start it normally to set it up first.
This looks very exciting, I hope setting up ones own server will become easy too, having a self-hosted dropbox-like (user-friendly) solution that works on all platforms would make it The killer app for collaboration. I mean, git already is this for the technical crowd, but at the moment you can’t really collaborate using git with the non-techs :-/
@Kevin Kevin Brubeck Unhammer: yes, I’m working someting really easy.
Really keen on this project, it looks great! Please change the grey-on-black colour scheme for the site, though, as I seriously have to highlight the text just to read it.
Have you looked into using http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/features.html ?
Hi,
Great project.
Is there somewhere a mailing list for contributers, beta-testers,… ?
It would be great, cause I’d like to be one of the beta-testers to give you feedbacks.
I’ve actually tried to install the beta release on Ubuntu 10.04. Installation was good (no fatal error), but if I want to start the service, it doesn’t work, here the message :
————–
elgo@Mistik:~$ sparkleshare start
Starting SparkleShare… Done.
elgo@Mistik:~$
Unhandled Exception: System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: ApplicationName=’git’, CommandLine=”, CurrentDirectory=”
at System.Diagnostics.Process.Start_noshell (System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo startInfo, System.Diagnostics.Process process) [0×00000]
at System.Diagnostics.Process.Start_common (System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo startInfo, System.Diagnostics.Process process) [0×00000]
at System.Diagnostics.Process.Start () [0×00000]
at (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) System.Diagnostics.Process:Start ()
at SparkleShare.SparkleShare.Main (System.String[] args) [0×00000]
——
Did I forget something?
Thanks
Eric
@Hooloovoo: no
@Eric you can visit #sparkleshare on irc.gnome.org. And the crash is probably because you don’t have git installed.
Here is what using SparkleShare looks like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmAyTntlv4k
Great Job!
Thanks guys, really interested in this.
Best support the google doc
Hi there!
I’ve been testing the project and it looks amazing!
I would like to create a dropbox-like server but in the documentation doesn’t explain how to buil my own sparkleshare host. Could you help me?
thanks!
I think that your work is simply amazing! I’m not a developer,but I suggest you to give a look to funambol projects https://www.forge.funambol.org ,it provides a good data sync server and a lot of clients (even for mobile devices).
Up to now community edition allows you to sync pim data (contacts and calendar),it’s not what sparkleshare is designed for but maybe could be a good point to start.
(I wrote this because in the documentation I have read that what I save on Github and Gitorious is public,and sometimes people doesn’t it for their work)
checking for gmcs… no
configure: error: gmcs Not found
Where can i fine gmcs? I found mono-gmcs but its the same.
Hi there!
i have a problem how to start sparkleshare.
First i started sparkeshare with:
peter@peter-desktop:~$ sparkleshare start
Configuration seems good, data was synchronyzed.
But when i restart sparkleshare with:
peter@peter-desktop:~$ sparkleshare stop
Stopping SparkleShare… Done.
peter@peter-desktop:~$ sparkleshare start
i get the following messages:
:
:
[11:14:47][Git][SharedSparkleData] Checking for remote changes…
[11:14:47][Git][SharedSparkleData] Staging changes…
fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git
[11:14:47][Git][SharedSparkleData] Changes staged.
fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git
[11:14:48][Irc][SharedSparkleData] Connected. Now listening…
But when i change into ~/SparkleShare/SharedSparkleData and start sparkleshare everything is o.k.
peter@peter-desktop:~$ sparkleshare stop
Stopping SparkleShare… Done.
peter@peter-desktop:~$ cd SparkleShare/SharedSparkleData/
peter@peter-desktop:~/SparkleShare/SharedSparkleData$ sparkleshare start
:
:
[11:23:02][Git][SharedSparkleData] Checking for remote changes…
[11:23:02][Git][SharedSparkleData] Staging changes…
[11:23:02][Git][SharedSparkleData] Changes staged.
[11:23:02][Commit][SharedSparkleData] edited ‘Readme’
[11:23:02][Git][SharedSparkleData] Checking for remote changes…
[11:23:02][Git][SharedSparkleData] Pushing changes…
[11:23:02][Irc][SharedSparkleData] Connected. Now listening…
Counting objects: 5, done.
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 333 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
:
With one remote folder this is a workaround, but not with more remote folders.
@Peter I think you’re using a broken git checkout. But please open a bug report or drop by in the IRC channel, blog comments aren’t really a good way to fix issues.
@Bravo Did you install mono-devel? The above applies too.
@PepeReis I’m working on an easy solution.
@Luca Those services are optional. You can host your own service if you want, but more on that later.
I’m not a coder, just an online freelancer looking for something like Dropbox, which allows me to sync my work files across my various Windows and Linux boxes as well as share with my clients (invariably using Windows) and online backup/storage.
Main reason I’m looking for alternatives to Dropbox is that I’m considering migrating from Linux to FreeBSD/PC-BSD where, despite suggested hacks, Dropbox doesn’t work. And of course Dropbox isn’t open-source, so no one else can tweak the code to make it work.
I look forward to your open-source Sparkleshare successfully becoming a user-friendly solution, and hopefully one that can work with non-developer-specific cloud storage options (e.g. Amazon S3).
Totally AWESOME project!
Can’t wait to see how to setup a server.
It should have a git/google code page so we can track the progress easily.
It’s looking good Hylke!
Some thoughts:
Totally agree with GALESL - We’ve got to get this working on S3! Since Git is the backend, perhaps it could be done by using something like Gits (http://github.com/abdelhalim/gits3)?
Gits is written in Python, but that’s not necessarily bad. If the project is extended to support Bazaar, it sounds like you would need Python anyway (from the above comments)? Anyways, Gits is not a massive amount of code to port should Python be out of the question.
As others have said, it would be wonderful if you just spend a couple of minutes to briefly outline what is required for a server. Just an ordinary git repository (and a link to the Git documentation)? No workarounds or tricks required? Or does it require such a huge non-standard setup that it’s really not practical for the average sysadmin to even attempt without reading the project source code?
Lastly, perhaps we could get Bugzilla and some forums happening? That way the community can help each other out and perhaps the questions regarding the server setup and run-time issues (eg. Git not installed) would already be answered.
Thanks for all the good work!! Feel free to contact me if you want any help setting up servers or what not in case you don’t have the time.
Never mind about Bugzilla - I found the link. Other points still stand.
Very nice tool. One thing i would like very much if it would be possible to make it pluggable into FreeNas. Is this something on the Wishlist ?
is there or will there be a beta version for mac ?
Really looking forward to testing the windows beta version
Hi, Hylke. I don’t realize what a SparkleServer is. Can I just create a git repository, put it in a NAS, and ask SparkleShare to access it through SSH?
One question that is not really answered in documentation or FAQ, but that I would assume is a given (just want to be 100% clear): whatever git repository is used can be used as usual by normal means as well? Also, does SparkleShare store any extra metadata or similar in the repository or is it “just” a wrapper around git commit and update etc commands?
Given a Windows client, I can really see this being used in companies as well, we have a lot of artists, writers and others that really only need to be able to save updated stuff to the same place as others. Usually this seems to be done by TortioseSVN and Subversion in all places I’ve worked, but many developers would really like to use Git (or Hg, or Bzr) instead.
As for the binary “problem”, I don’t think it’s a big problem, but I see people advising on how toe prune the history and rewriting the tree, whatever that is, as well as doing “git gc” to compress data - perhaps SparkleShare could offer some option to do some best practices on, say a collection of MP3s or other such data, via a menu option or so. I’m not sure what exactly, since I don’t know git.
One example of such discussion: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/540535/managing-large-binary-files-with-git
Hi, i’ve managed to create a server for SparkleShare by setting up git and copying ssh-keys from the client. So far so good.. I have a couple questions though: You are working to automate this process? How will a server determine access from different users? ACL with Gitosis?
Excelent job!
Cheers.
what about documents?
Maybe something like this can be used?
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/opendocument/
Bravo, congratulations
et mes encouragements pour mener à bien ce projet
I wish you all the best to continue and achieve your project
Your solution sounds to be THE solutin I am looking for
I am not a Linux but windows user with a WHS server , looking everywhere where to find simple an efficient way to back-up and synchronize my family PCs (home, laptop, student..) on the WHS through the internet (Dropbox, syncback,simplesync, buggybackup, crashplan, … were considered as well as MS live mesh - who will unfortunately no more support wndows xp or server 2003
in addition all of these need to:
1- rely on a third pparty server to eb able to run (every crash, unavailability, upgrade/change/ stop has impact on the personal solution)
2- transfer the personal files over the internet and to external server where , even if promises / commitments for confidentiality, encryption do not make me comfortable with.
Bonne chance et à bientôt
Bernard
Ramiro, can you share anymore tips? I was able to get it to sync once, but every time after that it fails.
Found a blog with good instructions on getting the server set up correctly:
http://www.moosechips.com/2011/02/sparkleshare-testing-ubuntu/
Months ago, sparkleshare gives us some kind of hope … an opensource filesharing-solution.
But now … days, weeks, no, months, … no change of the status on the website “builds coming soon…” . is sharkleshare going to be some kind of Hurd or Doom?
This is really annoying.
Ronny
Have you considered implementing sparkleshare using a (D)VCS-agnostic interface, which could be implemented for git and whatever other vcs one chooses to implement the interface for?
@Mark most of it works that way yes, but it can be better.
I’m really looking forward to this release.
I’ve been waiting long time for a dropbox alternative
that allows me to use my own servers.
I’ll definetely donate for this project.
Can you estimate how long it will take for the first windows beta?