kpilot AND kitchensync?

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kpilot AND kitchensync?
by anonymous coward on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @09:06

Please tell me why both KitchenSync/OpenSync AND kpilot are accepted. It seems they both do the same thing, just that OpenSync has a wider audience as it supports more devices and is platform/desktop agnostic.

I think kpilot has a very limited future, simply because the PalmOS is dying. Even if not, Opensync does have a palm-plugin.

Oh well, I guess everyone is allowed to work on what they want. Sometimes, I'd just like to be the boss of opensource :)

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Re: kpilot AND kitchensync?
by Sebastian Kügler on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @10:04

I'd not work for a boss of Open Source that thinks that two projects with overlapping functionality are abundant -- that's IMO one of the cornerstones of Free Software. :-)

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Re: kpilot AND kitchensync?
by Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @11:12

Actually, you're only kind of right. =;)

Kpilot and opensync both perform record-based syncing operations. Kpilot is focused on being the best maintenance/sync/functional interface that you could ever want for a Palm-OS-based device, while Opensync has much loftier goals of being a general syncing machine. Therein lies the rub, or part of it at least.

Kpilot does much more with palm pilots than opensync can do or is planning to be able to do. For example, it sets the time on your palm pilot, communicates with AvantGo for website downloads to your Palm, sends mail from your Palm, and has the ability to do a variety of non-record-based activity that opensync doesn't address. That's not to say one is better than the other. We just have different goals.

Now, that being said, part of the purpose of the SOC KPilot project is to refactor and dramatically improve KPilot's conduit base code so that we can not only more easily maintain it and stabilize it and reduce bug-counts, but also have a closer model to Opensync's record-based conduit syncing algorithm. The hope is that at some point in the future, once Opensync has stabilized (there's a big jump from 0.2x to 0.3x for Opensync, which is what the Opensync SOC project is addressing), and we clean up kpilot, we might have more synergy with Opensync and get rid of some of the duplicate code.

Oh, and as far as KPilot and PalmOS dying... I'd say we're dying at the same rate that COBOL is dying. That is to say that there is an awfully large user base of the new and legacy PalmOS-en (people are still using Handspring Visors!!!) just as there is of COBOL (which is a sad, sad thing to be sure, but truth nonetheless). =:)

HTH!! =:)

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Re: kpilot AND kitchensync?
by Bille on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @12:21

> people are still using Handspring Visors!!!

Hey! I have a Handspring Visor! It's the main openSUSE KPilot test device.

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