Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by jneander | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

jneander·

Fair enough. One can hope.

View on HN

File syncing is a hard problem..

Only because we make it hard.

If you've got a way to make it easy, we'd like to hear it.

Similar to git, but if you have multiple branches of the same file, display them visually and allow the user to merge just that file?

If people have to do anything it's not good enough.

That is then mathematically impossible.

What if I edit the same pixel, in the same image, in the same nanosecond on two different devices, and then sync?

There are situations where conflicts are necessary. The focus should be on making conflict resolution easily accessible, not on trying to be smart and overriding files at random

Actually quite a lot of serious by non-power-users do want this. You only have to look at a random persons laptop and see and the file names with "final version.docx", "final version 2.docx" "final final version.docx" etc to see this. They certainly don't want a console based solution but a cross between git and word style track changes would make lots of people pretty happy.

Well image if file systems, file formats and version control systems were built from the ground up together. Currently file syncing is harder because we expect our file server to handle an infinite variety of legacy file formats and the file sever cannot try to know anything about the document structure (whereas a version control system can examine the contents of plain text files).

Surely this is why Google docs can manage collaborative working more easily -- because they can control of the whole stack.

Better than the OP would be file syncing of arbitrary files between arbitrary systems is hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com