The git-annex assistant is being crowd funded on Kickstarter. Thanks to all my backers.

This is my design and plan for developing it. Still being fleshed out, still many ideas and use cases to add. Feel free to chip in with comments! --Joey

roadmap

  • Month 1 "like dropbox": [[!traillink inotify]] [[!traillink syncing]]
  • Month 2 "shiny webapp": [[!traillink webapp]] [[!traillink progressbars]]
  • Month 3 "easy setup": [[!traillink configurators]] [[!traillink pairing]]
  • Month 4 "polishing": [[!traillink cloud]] [[!traillink leftovers]]
  • Months 5-6 "9k bonus round": [[!traillink Android]] [[!traillink partial_content]]
  • Months 7-11: user-driven features and polishing
  • Month 12: "Windows purgatory" Windows

not yet on the map:

blog

I'll be blogging about my progress in the blog on a semi-daily basis. Follow along!

Will statically linked binaries be provided for say Linux, OSX and *BSD? I think having some statically linked binaries will certainly help and appeal to a lot of users.
Jimmy, I hope to make it as easy as possible to install. I've been focusing on getting it directly into popular Linux distributions, rather than shipping my own binary. The OSX binary is static, and while I lack a OSX machine, I would like to get it easier to distribute to OSX users.
Comment by http://joeyh.name/ Mon Jun 4 19:45:00 2012
I'd agree getting it into the main distros is the way to go, if you need OSX binaries, I could volunteer to setup an autobuilder to generate binaries for OSX users, however it would rely on users to have macports with the correct ports installed to use it (things like coreutils etc...)

I always appreciate your OSX work Jimmy...

Could it be put into macports?

Comment by http://joeyh.name/ Fri Jun 8 01:56:52 2012

In relation to macports, I often found that haskell in macports are often behind other distros, and I'm not willing to put much effort into maintaining or updating those ports. I found that to build git-annex, installing macports manually and then installing haskell-platform from the upstream to be the best way to get the most up to date dependancies for git-annex.

fyi in macports ghc is at version 6.10.4 and haskell platform is at version 2009.2, so there are a significant number of ports to update.

I was thinking about this a bit more and I reckon it might be easier to try and build a self contained .pkg package and have all the needed binaries in a .app styled package, that would work well when the webapp comes along. I will take a look at it in a week or two (currently moving house so I dont have much time)

It's not much for now... but see http://www.sgenomics.org/~jtang/gitbuilder-git-annex-x00-x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0/ I'm ignoring the debian-stable and pristine-tar branches for now, as I am just building and testing on osx 10.7.

Hope the autobuilder will help you develop the OSX side of things without having direct access to an osx machine! I will try and get gitbuilder to spit out appropriately named tarballs of the compiled binaries in a few days when I have more time.

Thanks, that's already been useful to me. You might as well skip the debian-specific "bpo" tags too.
Comment by http://joeyh.name/ Sat Jun 9 18:07:51 2012

The average OSX user has a) no idea what macports is, and b) will not be able to install it. Anything that requires a user to do anything with a commandline (or really anything other than using a GUI installer) is effectively a dealbreaker. For our use cases OSX is definitely a requirement, but it must only use standard OSX installation methods in order to be usable. Being in the appstore would be ideal, but standard dmg/pkg installers are still common enough that they are also acceptable.

FWIW this is the same reason many git GUIs were not usable for our OSX users: they required separate installation of the git commandline tools.

Comment by http://wiggy.net/ Tue Jun 12 13:00:34 2012

Hi,

it seems that you put a lot of efforts in handling race conditions. Thats great. I wonder if the watch can also be used with git (i.e. changes are commited into git and not as annex)? I know that other projects follow this idea but why using different tools if the git-annex assistant could handle both...

Comment by http://www.klomp.eu/ Fri Jun 15 17:25:30 2012

Homebrew is a much better package manager than MacPorts IMO.

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