Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Future of rdiff-backup: Python 3 migration and project maintainership in general

[Tobias Leupold]

Hi,

I've been an rdiff-backup user for years now (I'm not so fit with Python, so I
think this project is a bit above my skills when it comes to development ...),
and I also use it in a productive enviroment. I really like it. It's exactly
what I need. And I would really appreciate it not to be abandoned.

It's very nice that apparently, some guys out there want to bring it back to
life. Some years ago, Gentoo marked rdiff-backup for removal, but gladly, at
least some development was done by some folks so that they finally kept it.

Please do it! Please arrange on what fork and which commits to use, merge it
into some reasonable code base and start over. What Eric wrote sounded
reasonable tome. Additionally I I think a full-time Debian developer who wants
to adopt rdiff-backup can't be the worst case, can it?! ;-)

Thanks for putting effort in this nice project and make it going on!

Cheers, Tobias

Am Samstag, 27. Juli 2019, 08:37:15 CEST schrieb Eric L.:
> Hello again (in the morning for me),
>
> in more length and with a fresh mind, and after having gone through all
> thread answers, let me give a lengthy position:
>
> 0. I'm the EricZolf referenced elsewhere, who has a branch finished for
> Linux with the migration to Python 3. I'll post a note after this e-mail
> into the PR 40 to prove it.
>
> 1. it's great to see that there is still a community of users, I didn't
> realise, else I'd have communicated earlier. I'm now on the mailing list
> so all is good.
>
> 2. I started the migration effort because I didn't want to lose my
> backup tool once Python 2 is out of support, else I'm an IT guy with
> quite a lot of Ansible background (Python!), one wife, 2 children, a
> consulting job and little time, but making the best out of it.
>
> 3. Initially, I didn't want to create my own definitive fork but wanted
> to give sol1 a chance to become active and take their job as maintainer
> seriously. As Otto noticed, I wasn't very successful till now. I would
> have given them the Summer to react and then I'd have gone my own way,
> without a clear idea how to create a community.
>
> 4. Knowing now that there is still such a community alive (thanks to
> Otto!), I'd suggest following approach:
>
> a. I'll ping a last time sol1 and ask for their position.
> b. In the meantime, review my PR, it's huge, no chance to merge anything
> else before it's merged back into master.
> c. I merge back into my master based on your feedback.
> d. A last task is required before others can start and I would ask your
> patience a last time: I want the whole code to be PEP8 conform before
> others contribute to it, and I think (but open to discussion) that it's
> best done if one person does it in one go.
> e. Once this is done, I would second Patrick's suggestion and create an
> rdiff-backup project, open it to the community and push my repository to
> there for further common work (I wouldn't like to lose my repository
> because I have 30+ issues I've created as I went through the code).
>
> A few more side notes:
>
> A. my PR isn't tested against Windows and Mac, feel free to test and
> push fix PR against my branch on my repo and I'll merge (it should work,
> never tried, else I'll merge manually). Please focus on regression bugs
> that we get quickly this huge branch merged.
> B. I'm fully with Patrick regarding CI/CD, if you know tox, you'll see
> that I have a good start and one of my next moves would probably have
> been to integrate tox with GitHub's pipeline.
> C. This and anything else like web page, a mailing list we own, release
> process, and pending issues, we can discuss together once we've agreed
> on the big plan.
>
> Let the discussion roll, happy to be here, happy to hear there are
> others who care about rdiff-backup, thanks to Otto for kicking this!
> Eric