Re: Version Woes

[Derek Atkins]

Frank,

Frank Crawford <address@hidden> writes:

> Shortly, as in weeks, there will be a version of rdiff-backup 1.2.8
> available from my COPR repository, but that will never get back into
> any of the official channel, because they won't be accepted.  Also
> remember that this needs to cover EPEL as well as Fedora, and EPEL
> versions will last far longer than any Fedora version.

How do you know it wont be accepted?  Have you tried to make the case?

I'm certainly happy to help you formulate it; the Powers That Be at
Fedora DO understand "backwards compatibility" as at least a
short-to-medium term reason to keep multiple versions in the repos
simultaneously.

> In reality you also need to consider this for non-RHEL distibutions
> too, but that is a question for the other distributions.

Of course, but I don't use those so I'm not going to champion them.
I would certainly encourage others to do so.

> The second item is to automatically do this on the wire, and that is
> only ever likely to be an unofficial package, as it real is only for
> transition.

I take issue with this world-view that it is a "transition".  I've got
servers out there that don't have rdiff-backup-2 in their repos and
probably never will.  So until those servers go out of maintenance
(which is probably years) I will have to maintain some level of
compatibility.

So I suppose if you squint hard it is a "transition", but that
"transition" could last another 5+ years, depending.

> Now having said that, as you already have to have your backups scripted
> somehow, even if it is just a shell that loops through a list of hosts,
> you will need to make mods to choose one of the two versions during
> execution.  This can be as simple as a two separate lists, or something
> to make the choice on the fly, but there is no standard way to do this
> within rdiff-backup, as it doesn't do any host selection currently.

Yes, I understand that.  I could manually figure it out; I would
certainly prefer a more automated switcher.  I'm not your average user
here, however, so I'm thinking of someone less clueful than you or I who
might not understand why their backups suddenly break when a system gets
upgraded.

>> Honestly I'd prefer #1, but can live with #2.  Is there another approach
>> to achieve the objective?
>> 
>> > Thanks, Eric
>> 
>> -derek
>
> Regards
> Frank

-drek

-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       address@hidden             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant