The folder connector was pointed at a Nextcloud VFS tree and got three
things wrong, the first of which loses work.
**A dehydrated sidecar read as absent.** `a.drsc` does not exist when the
client has dehydrated it — only `a.drsc.nextcloud` does — so `get` missed,
`.ok()` swallowed the `NotFound`, and the sidecar writer took that for
"there is no sidecar yet" and wrote a fresh document over the existing
one. Every edit another device had put there went with it. That function's
own doc comment calls this the exact loss the format's unknown-key
preservation exists to prevent.
**A stub was catalogued as a 1-byte image**, and ARCH §9.0 measured this
machine at 121,785 placeholders against 10,267 real files — so a folder
library on a synced tree was ~92% broken rows.
**Identity changed on hydration**, so downloading a photograph looked like
a delete and an add, orphaning its thumbnail and its face rows.
Entries now carry the photograph's own name and a `materialised` flag;
`get` on a stub returns the new `RemoteError::NotMaterialised`, which is
distinct from `NotFound` precisely because the sidecar writer must treat
them differently — it fetches the sidecar and merges, or leaves the entry
queued.
Hydration is a **borrow**. `BorrowPool` records what was on disk before it
asked, so `release_all` dehydrates only what a pass brought and leaves
what the user already had. Reference counted: the thumbnail pass and the
face pass meet on the same RAW, and without counting the first to finish
dehydrates the file the second is reading. A borrow against a plain folder
or a server does nothing, so a pass written for VFS runs everywhere.
Releasing means asking the client to dehydrate and never deleting: a
deletion inside a synced tree propagates to the server and removes the
photograph from every device.
Not a second backend — the capability is per *connection*, not per type,
since the same folder hydrates only while the client runs. The convention
arrives through a detector the registry supplies, so `dr-sync-folder`
still knows nothing about any client's protocol.
ARCH §9.0a records this as an amendment: finding 3 rejected hydration
because it costs 100× a range read, and that comparison assumed a
connector was available. A folder library has none.
Investigated using the Nextcloud desktop client's Virtual Files as a
cache instead of talking to the server directly. Measured on this
machine (client 4.0.7): the configured folder holds 121,785 placeholders
against 10,267 materialised files, including 7,037 CR2 and 9,411 DNG.
Three findings, each independently disqualifying:
- Linux VFS is *suffix* mode. A dehydrated IMG.CR2 exists only as
IMG.CR2.nextcloud holding one byte; the real name is absent.
- Reading a placeholder does not hydrate it. dd of the first 256KB
returned 1 byte, the stub was unchanged, and the real name never
appeared. There is no FUSE layer — the stub is an inert marker.
- Even with hydration the granularity is wrong: VFS has two states,
1 byte or all bytes, and the preview tier needs a ~256KB prefix of
a 27MB file. That is ~100x what FR-NC-3 requires.
Recorded as ARCH §9.0. Coexistence is still supported: dr-types now
recognises *.nextcloud stubs, and the viewer lists them as "not
downloaded" rather than as corrupt files or not at all.
So the connector talks to the server directly, as D7 specified.
Implemented: Login Flow v2, PROPFIND with oc:fileid and nc:has-preview,
ETag pruning via a Depth:0 probe, range GET with local slicing when the
server ignores the header, conditional PUT, and /core/preview with
forceIcon=false. delta() returns Unsupported and says why.
Chunked upload v2 is not implemented yet — put() rejects bodies over
5MB explicitly rather than silently truncating.
Two bugs found by testing: my hand-computed epoch in a date test was a
day out (the parser was right), and quick-xml reaches EOF on truncated
input without erroring, so unbalanced elements needed an explicit check
— a half-parsed multistatus must not look like an empty directory.
83 tests passing.
dtourolle