Re: version 2.2 --remove-older-than behavior changed

[qx6uwumzvv]

On 2023-02-16 21:34, Eric Zolf ewl+rdiffbackup-at-lavar.de 
|rdiff-backup-users| wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 16/02/2023 20:41, qx6uwumzvv@liamekaens.com wrote:
> > IMHO, "No increment is older than ...." is normal behavior and should 
> > not cause a warning, especially since nonzero status codes are 
> > considered abnormal termination by most shells (even the Python docs 
> > <https://docs.python.org/3/library/sys.html#sys.exit> mention this), 
> > and can cause backup scripts to terminate.
>
> If there is a warning message, and there always was a warning message, 
> then it's not a "normal" behavior, at least not in my books.
>
> For example, if you're short on disk space, want to remove some 
> increments, and choose the wrong selector, then you'd be happy to 
> notice that nothing was removed (and your next backup might fail).
>
> So, yes, this is abnormal (or do you call the command just to have it 
> remove nothing?) but not a fatal error.
>
> Check the man page of a few commands and you'll see that it's not 
> uncommon (ls, grep, rsync...).
>
> KR, Eric

I really appreciate rdiff-backup and like the new command syntax, so I 
don't want to sound like a whiner, but like tbsky the change to make "No 
increment is older than ...." a warning and return a nonzero status code 
disruptive and a big surprise.

I, and I imagine many others, run "rdiff-backup remove increments 
--older-than ..." before every backup.  For backups containing slowly 
changing files, it reports "No increment is older than ...." most of the 
time.  I would guess that in all my different backups I get "No 
increment is older than ...." about 1/3 of the time.  I'm happy to see 
the "NOTE: No increments older than ... found, exiting." message, but I 
see no reason for an additional WARNING that just clutters the output of 
my backup script making it more difficult to notice when there a real 
problems, and especially a nonzero status code that will cause my script 
to terminate unless I change the shell setting to ignore errors, which 
means the script won't terminate when there is a "real" problem.