[Duplicity-talk] duplicity's future development

[Ben Escoto]

>>>>> Mathias de Riese <address@hidden>
>>>>> wrote the following on Fri, 29 Jul 2005 11:30:30 +0200
> 
> Much more constructive would be the question, whether anybody is
> still maintaining duplicity? (Ben, are you out there?) And how many
> people are using it?  (I am, but not on very important stuff.) Sad
> if it would die. And if it has to die, what else should we use?

Good question :)  Here's the way I see things:


1. Report on last couple years

Firstly, I'd like to say sorry to everyone still on the list for not
keeping a better eye on duplicity.  Because duplicity is an open
source program I don't have a commitment to keep developing it.
However, there are some things I should have done (like restrict
posting to the list to list members) that would have helped a lot and
not taken much time.

Until very recently, I had not been using duplicity personally.  Also
I seemed to have less time in the last couple years, and did not have
time to adequately develop my two backup projects (rdiff-backup and
duplicity).  For these two reasons I kept putting off duplicity
development while vaguely intending to get around to it sometime.


2. Is duplicity still useful?

I recently wanted to backup some of my data to an untrusted host that
had some bandwidth restrictions.  I had FTP access, but not shell
access.  I looked around, thinking that duplicity was probably
obsolete, but I didn't find anything that did what I wanted.  (If you
know a program that does what duplicity does, let me know---I was
really looking for the best tool for the job.)

Then I tried duplicity out.  Surprisingly, it actually worked fine for
me, including some test restores.  It was exactly what I wanted.  It
still strikes me as a clever little program that fills a real need.
So I plan to continue using it personally.


3. Future duplicity plans

I still don't think I have time to be an active duplicity developer.
If anyone here uses rdiff-backup, I feel I've recently caught up on
rdiff-backup development, but I'll have less time in the future, and
will spent most of my open-source time on rdiff-backup.

However, because I'm using duplicity personally, I'll make sure it
compiles, and I'll probably fix any bugs that I see personally.  I'll
also look through the list soon for any patches that need to be
checked in.  I won't implement any suggestions that other people have,
even if they are good (which they usually are).  This isn't really
good enough for a "real" maintainer, but that's all the work I'll do
personally.


-- 
Ben Escoto

pgpvpM8prlHpT.pgp
Description: PGP signature