Hi Just though I should introduce myself to the Ubuntu developers mailing list and let you rip my idea proposal apart!
I'm Dan Harvey a Natural Science student at Durham Uni (UK) doing computer science and am very keen to help out improving the usability of the Ubuntu desktop. The idea I propose links in with two other ideas proposed on the Ubuntu GSOC wiki for "Integrated web sharing" and "Easy file sharing and synchronization" (minus the sync which is a whole different problem in itself...). Basically it involves creating a DBus interface for file transfer/sharing allowing a unified desktop GUI to access different file transfer services to either publish files to share or download. This hides the user from any protocol or service differences and just lets then do what they want with there data. I'll add a bit more detail with a few use cases. Say Fred wants to share a file with a few friends but its too large to e-mail. So the GUI picks behind the scenes that the web server is best so asks the http service (could be new daemon or modified Apache or lighter) to host a file and make sure ports are opened for it, then returns a url for Fred to give to his friends. All the app has to do (be it nautilus, f-spot, banshee) is ask for the file to be hosted and the http service does the rest. Freds friend then comes along and finds the link to download, as he's using Ubuntu the transfer service for him decided to pick the http service to download it and he's happy. Next is Chris who has recorded a new song with his band (we need a gnome based garage band replacement!) and wants to spread it to all his friends, and their friends as its an amazing song. So he goes though the common GUI which picks (based on its size and who he's sending it to) that bit torrent would be the best solution. So this App asks the bit torrent service to publish his song, which in turn asks the http service to host the torrent file and song to seed it which he can in turn send to a friend for them to download. Chris's friend also happens to be using Ubuntu (or other gnome based OS) and find this link to download, the transfer service now works in reverse again and picks the bit torrent service to download it with. He gets the song and is happy as well! The reason to have a single DBus interface for the different services means the user never know which protocol is used for either sharing or receiving so are provided with a consistent user interface. This can extend to many different protocols in many different applications and many different user cases making it quite simple but very powerful. Sorry for such a long first message but I want to post the idea here so I can get some feed back on it. Will this be useful for people? is this a good way to solve this problem? do you see any large flaws in it? Thanks for your time, Dan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
