I have some questions about how to best manage content on mobile devices. This is probably more of a wishlist discussion, although I haven't had enough experience with the assistant and preferred content features enough to know how much of this might already be possible.

(While I did donate to both campaigns, I also didn't donate at the "personal git-annex assistant" level, so I also know not to expect personal undivided attention :) . Any tips would be appreciated.)

In short, I don't think git-annex really fits with how I'd like to use it on my Android phone. My current setup is as follows:

  • I have a large repository with various media files. This is stored on several computers, at least one of which generally has a copy of everything. I use a centralized bare repo to automatically synchronize between computers with "git annex sync origin" using cron, and manually control what is on each one using "copy --to host", "get", "drop", etc. It is awesome.

What I would like for Android is:

  • The phone keeps in sync with the origin repository.

  • On the phone, I'd like to browse through and choose content to get or drop. I could use the command-line "get" and "drop" for this, of course, but being able to do it through the webapp would be better, as typing on a phone is no fun.

  • From off the phone, I'd like to be able to choose which content should be on the phone. For example, using the command line or webapp on my desktop, I'd like to be able to choose media files that should be downloaded to (or removed from) the phone. However, I don't want to have to move files between directories in the repository to achieve this.

  • The only useful content that gets created on the phone is photos and videos. Those should get uploaded to the main server, but only the most recent files should remain on the phone by default (say, anything older than 2 weeks gets dropped). Both on the phone, and off the phone, I'd be able to override that using the previously described features, so that certain photos remain on the phone forever, or get dropped earlier.

Thoughts? I feel like git-annex is close to being able to do this.

-jim