Re: [rdiff-backup-users] feature requests and notes

[Andrew K. Bressen]

OK, I've added 
 metadata manipulation
 --dry-run
 --retain-at-least
 full consistency check
 manpage/docs notes 

 sparse files
 remove intermediate increments
 remove enough to finish 

to the support request system. 

I classed the latter three as "possibly impractical" because Ben's
on-list replies made me think that they would be tricky to do.


> The new 'B' letter doesn't complicate the syntax (just the
> implementation :)).  If anything it is safer because
> --remove-older-than 5B will never delete all your history.  Addition
> of --retain-at-least is still possible, as in:
>
>     --remove-older-than 1M --retain-at-least 5B
>
> or even
>
>     --remove-older-than 2003-10-05 --retain-at-least 1M

When I said "complicate the syntax", I meant that I was  
proposing complicating the rather simple/elegant "B" syntax 
by adding another switch in order to get the extra functionality.


>>     [s]locate(1) functionality
>>     md5 sums
>>     file integrity (tripwire/integrit) functionality
>>     retrieve increment history of a specific file
>
> What do these mean?

The last, retrieve increment history of a specific file,
was something mentioned by Keith Edmunds in his list mail of 16-sep-03. 

 As I read it, he wanted to be able to list all information about a specific
 file in the backup; ie, something like "ls -ali" output showing all
 the versions of the file in the archive, so one could see at what point
 in time a certain problem occurred, and thus figure out which version
 to retrieve. 

The second, md5 sums, was from some earlier list discussion about
using them vs. inodes for change detection. 

The other two refer to one of my hobby-horses, which is that backups, 
integrity/intrusion checking (tripwire, integrit, etc.), 
fast locate apps (gnu locate, slocate, etc.) and 
duplicate file finding apps (fdupes and many others) 
all end up needing and using the same info 
(basically, the contents of the metadata file plus some hashes and atime), 
so making one app or set of related apps do all of these saves cycles
and overall complexity. I mentioned this on-list a while ago.

Let me know if I should add this or the file info listing to the 
support request list...

I'll write seperately about error output.