Some notes on my SOC proposal

Reading some comments on my SOC proposal I have the impression that someone didn’t understand what I’m going to work on, I don’t want to write yet another Samba-like program but an application to send files over a LAN without the need to share folders.

Systems like Samba or FTP are useful at home or work when you want to permanently share a folder, but often people just want to quickly send a file to some specific person. For that you do not want to first put it in your shared files and then tell your contact that he/she can find it there. Moreover using Samba or FTP means that you have to handle permissions and passwords or just have a public folder available to everyone, which could be a security problem. So on occasional situations just right-clicking on a file and using “Send to” (through a nautilus-send-to back-end) to send this file to a person is a lot nicer.

Recently Xavier Claessens, the author of gossip-telepathy, started to work on grapevine, a modular version of gossip using Nokia’s mission control. A good idea would be to work on it adding file transfers capabilities instead of writing a separate GUI, this way other protocols could benefit of my work, making easy to send files using every chat protocol.

Note that I’m not going to invent new protocols, I will use XMPP (aka Jabber) and in particular I want to work on telepathy-salut, a Telepathy connection manager for XEP-0174, the protocol used by iChat for serverless chats on a LAN. For file transfer stuff I’m going to base my work on the code written by Mads Chr. Olesen for the last year soc on collaborative applications using Telepathy.

Update: The project has been accepted and it’s now called Telekinesis.

9 thoughts on “Some notes on my SOC proposal”

  3. Hello,

    There is not yet a spec in telepathy for file transfer, but some guys are working on that atm. I think it would be a *very* good idea to have FT in tp-salut, if you can help for FT spec, implementation into tp-salut and gossip I would be very happy!!

    For grapevine it’s not really usable yet, I think actually the best idea is to still work on gossip.

    And yes, lots of work is being done on gossip to support FT, don’t know the status of that…

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  4. gossip is a single monolithic application, I want a separate program for file transfers so you can use it even without a full chat program running. This is why before the release of mission-control and grapevine I was planning an independent program for LAN file transfers.

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  5. I had a similar idea some time ago, but with a differnet approach. There are already enough file transfer thingies out there, but as you state, the permissions/passwords thingie is a showstopper.

    So my idea was too create a pam_dbus module. Nothing more, that a simple popup, asking me if the user, ip, comment may use the requested service.

    This does not scale anywhere, for sure, but for the described scenario this will work. And yes it will block, ich youre not at your pc. And yes, you can be spammed/phised to death, but anyway i think it would be worth a shot.

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