Subject: NNTP and RSS on multiple computers is just a special case

From: Ken Bloom <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:05:14 -0500

While it is definitely true that one wastes time on multiple computers,
and NNTP and RSS suffer the same problem, so do most other programs.
There has been a push lately for bookmark sharing (usually through
something like del.icio.us), email sharing (IMAP), calendar sharing, and
contact sharing (several protocols for this, but none is exactly
"standard"), there's no general solution for "sharing all the data I
might need".

Personally, I find that by keeping my $HOME in subversion, I can
synchronize my .newsrc, just by checking the .newsrc into my repository
just like everything else. An RSS reader's list of read messages would
just be another config file to check in to my repository.

Now, when one checks a config file into a version control system, there
is a small matter of reconciling conflicts, where we could stand to do a
lot better. However, having solved the general problem, the specific
problem of avoiding conflicts with a specific application can always be
solved by adjusting your working habits to commit and update when moving
computers, if no more automatic and permissive solution can be found.

--Ken

-- 
Ken (Chanoch) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/