Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Re: Error: Too Many values to unpack

[Steven Willoughby]

Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> I'm a user of the Debian packagings of "rdiff-backup", and have been bit
> hard as a result of Debian's version choices and the
> non-backward-compatible protocol changes between 1.1.5 and 1.1.12.
>
> Currently, Debian "stable" contains a development version of
> "rdiff-backup" (which in hindsight seems to have been a mistake, given
> that it no longer works with versions people are using on their
> workstations).
>
> I think Debian needs to switch to packaging versions of "rdiff-backup"
> that guarantee compatibility with whatever version of "rdiff-backup" is
> in Debian "stable" (currently, Debian "etch").
>
> Then, to solve the problem of Debian "stable" being broken, what might
> be very helpful is to produce a stable version of "rdiff-backup" that is
> backward-compatible with 1.1.5, so that Debian can (ideally) make this
> new stable version a security update for Debian "etch".
>
> See also:
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=426110
>
> One thing I should add... Some people, myself included, who use Debian
> for mission-critical servers (including as backup servers using
> rdiff-backup), make a point to run only Debian "stable" plus select
> security updates.  Downloading ".deb" from random places, or even from
> some semi-official backports site, is very much frowned upon by such 
> people.
>
> I'd appreciate your thoughts on this.  Please note that I'm not a Debian
> maintainer, but I am pushing on this issue because my backup scheme is
> dead in the water right now. :)

I'm not sure if it's the official recommended course of action, but you 
can pin your workstations to 1.1.5 if they are running "testing" by 
having both "stable" and "testing" in sources.list and putting the 
following in /etc/apt/preferences:

Package: rdiff-backup
Pin: version 1.1.5-4
Pin-Priority: 1001

This has worked around the issue for me, YMMV.

Steven