[rdiff-backup-users] something about librsync

[devzero]

hi !

some interesting post from the librsync mailinglist - see below.

regards
roland


Re: librsync
From: Donovan Baarda <address@hidden> - 2006-12-30 04:44
On Tue, 2006-12-26 at 06:28 -0800, dverlaeckt wrote:
> Message body follows:
>
> Hi there
>
> I&#8217;m a software developer working for an IT company. In my
> search for an rsync capable library I came across librsync.
> By the looks of it, it isn&#8217;t being actively maintained.

It is still actively being used by several projects, probably the
largest and most active of which is rdiff-backup.

There has not much activity on it mostly because it's pretty stable now.
There are some plans for it's future development, but no-one seems to
have much time or motivation to work on them.

> So I was wondering:
>
> -Is 0.9.6 the latest version?

Yes, though CVS has some important fixes for files >4G that should go
into a new release. There has been some discussion on doing a new
release, but no-one has done it yet and everyone is just using CVS.

Note that although everyone has been a bit slack about doing a new
release, I have been pretty systematic about accepting patches and
processing bugs.

> -Is is stable enough for production use? (absolutely no loss
> of data may occur in my application)

Anything rsync related has a very-very-very tiny chance of "data loss"
because it is based on hash "checksums"... there is always a possibility
that two different data blocks have the same checksum. However, the
checksum sizes are so large that the probabilities are negligible.

In terms of code stability/reliability, rdiff-backup has been using it
and is widely used for system backups. In the past, most bugs in
librsync have been identified and reported by rdiff-backup users. Since
the last bugfix submitted to CVS on 2006-03-10 10:44, the only bugs
reported have been feature-wishlists and requests for a new release.

> -Are there alternatives that you know of?

Not as a C library... there are some things in Perl and Python.

IMHO librsync is the best thing available right now. Even if it is not
quite right for you, it is the best starting point. I will happily
accept patches and if necessary give you developer rights so that you
can make it better.

The librsync project is as active as people like you make it :-)

-- 
Donovan Baarda <address@hidden>
http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/ 
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