[sword-devel] unified GDrive filesystem repo

[Karl Kleinpaste]

This has been on my mind for a couple years: Creation of a unified 
module repo in one of the major cloud storage systems. Some months ago, 
I got around to fiddling with things enough to make it a possibility. 
I'm wondering how useful others might find this, and whether users could 
put it to use if it was offered publicly.

Google Drive has been the most obvious candidate for storage because it 
has, as far as I know, the most generous space for free usage. Along 
with filesystem tools like rclone and sshfs, it's possible to glue many 
random things around the net into a filesystem as a quasi-local reference.

If you're not aware of rclone, see https://rclone.org/ where you'll 
learn it's "rsync for cloud storage." It has support for Windows, Linux, 
and MacOS. Most importantly to me, rclone has a FUSE-driven mount 
capability, by which I can simply glue remote filesystems to my own. So 
I use sshfs to mount ftp.xiphos.org and ftp.crosswire.org (because I 
have personal creds there), and rclone with an anon configuration to 
mount eBible and IBT. Then I use rsync from each to push it all into my 
Google Drive.

I have cloned 11 repos into my personal GDrive, using a script that can 
update them regularly (though it's manual so far, not yet cron-driven):

crosswire/pub/sword/atticraw
crosswire/pub/sword/betaraw
crosswire/pub/sword/dbgraw
crosswire/pub/sword/experimentalraw
crosswire/pub/sword/lockmanraw
crosswire/pub/sword/raw
crosswire/pub/sword/wyclifferaw
crosswire/pub/bible-org/sword
xiphos/pub/xiphos
ebible
ibt

These occupy ~5Gbytes. Then the user could surf this shared link for my 
GDrive to connect at his end: 
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nDVZRDfs8EtdXV_aKpbea1YbSEOSyJW5 
...and then an rclone configuration at his end will let him get at these 
things directly using "local" filesystem references with 
InstallMgr.conf's "DIRSource=" directive.

I'm a networks guy, so this is in part a technical toy to me. But it 
requires someone adept enough to use GDrive in the 1st place, and to use 
rclone to get at their GDrive.

It's likely that I've overthought this to a degree. Nonetheless what do 
others think about the availability of all repos in a one-stop-shopping 
motif under a common subtree?
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