Re: Tramp rclone

[Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

Hi Richard,

> However, the other question remains: how does it access Google
> Drive?

I'm not an expert in Google APIs. I've tried to understand by reading
several ressources plus the rclone source tree.

IIUC, rclone uses Google's Go App Engine as working horse. There seems
to be two different app engines, "Standard App Engine" and "Flexible App
Engine". The documentation reads like the Standard App Engine runs
locally on your machine, part of your local application, and the
Flexible App Engine runs in a virtual machine on Google
infrastructure. Accessing the data (files in Google Drive, for example)
is offered by a REST API in both cases.

The documentation of rclone says in rclone/vendor/google.golang.org/appengine/README.md:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
This repository supports the Go runtime on *App Engine standard*.

[...]

This package does not work on *App Engine flexible*.

There are many differences between the App Engine standard environment and
the flexible environment.
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

It doesn't look like software is downloaded from Google Servers in order
to run rclone. However, I will contact the rclone author for
clarification.

> (Is there a difference between Google Drive and Google Docs?
> I've heard people say they are the same thing.)

Don't know.

Best regards, Michael.