Re: [Duplicity-talk] Deleting large files from archive?

[Charles Duffy]

David Schneider-Joseph wrote:
> To follow up: I consider this to be a major missing feature.  There's 
> absolutely nothing to be done, and no future course for development?  
> If you could point me in the right direction I'd be willing to work on 
> a patch myself.
Duplicity's design pretty much precludes it; consequently, a storage 
format change would be necessary to support this feature, and storage 
format changes are... a significant undertaking.

rdiff-backup also doesn't have this feature, though its design is much 
more amenable to the extension (and history editing is a much-requested 
thing there as well) -- but if you need duplicity's security guarantees, 
the lack of a straightforward mechanism for implementing 
reasonable/efficient history editing (without a complete disk format 
rework -- which would need to be done /very/ carefully to maintain 
duplicity's present security guarantees) is the consequence.


I can think of a few ways to modify the disk format to maintain 
reasonable security guarantees and place an upper bound on the amount of 
information that needs to be transmitted back and forth during the 
history-editing process -- but anything that comes to mind would require 
larger code changes than are presently feasible, never mind the complete 
lack of backwards compatibility.