Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Version incompatibility and availability

[Andreas Olsson]

On Friday 20 November 2009 00:19:59 Scot Wilcoxon wrote:
> I ran headlong into the version incompatibility problem, because I'm
> running different versions of Ubuntu thus there are different rdiff-backup
> versions packaged on the two systems.
> 
> I don't see documentation for the version compatibility rules.  Is it
> required that all the clients and servers be the same version?  That
> greatly reduces the benefits of packaging systems, if manual recompilation
> on many systems is needed.
> 
> Not even my newest Ubuntu server can be trusted with rdiff-backup.  It
> only has 1.2.7, and you're not offering that version, so I can't install
> 1.2.7 on other systems.

Well, there is a stated goal to compatibility in the stable branch, which now 
happen to be 1.2.x. In other word it should be safe to run the Ubuntu 9.04 
rdiff-backup (1.2.7) and the Ubuntu 9.10 rdiff-backup (1.2.8).

The fact that you will receive a warning (not an error) is probably due to 
historic and/or cautionary reasons. Just do a few backups, verify that it 
works fine and you should then be able to simply ignore/filter that warning.

The real potential problem arises if you are using older Ubuntu releases, such 
as 8.04 or 8.10. They include rdiff-backup versions from its development 
branch, which very well might be none compatible each other as well as newer 
versions.  In that case it might very well be a good idea to use the PPA which 
Adrian Klaver has already suggested:

https://launchpad.net/~rdiff-backup-pkgs/+archive/ppa

I use it myself, and find it very useful. That's probably the reason to why I 
maintain it in the first place :)

Anyway, including development versions of rdiff-backup in Ubuntu was in 
hindsight a mistake. Most likely that will not happen again. See the 
discussion in this bug thread for more information:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128242

// Andreas

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