On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 10:37 -0400, Scott Trudeau wrote:
Theoretically, a way to "sync" Drupal site instances (Google Gears aside) would be awesome. Practically, it is a very hard problem to solve since most Drupal sites are in constant flux "in the wild" and therefor, once you "copy" a local version of the site and make changes, you have two separate branches with many potential opportunities for collision. You can handle some sync collisions intelligently but there will always be weird cases. Also, I can't even begin to imagine how much more effort it would take to build modules that can handle a sync framework.
And then ? It's the same thing when you take your time to add or edit a node on a busy site: you've got a "temporarily offline" reference in your web browser which is "synced back" to the database when you press "save".