Hi Josh, > Development on rdiff-backup has stagnated for the last while. I think that > this is attributable to several reasons: > * Andrew has dropped of the face of the earth, (he's working on graduate > studies, IIRC) and I've been busy with other things. Since we're the two core > maintainers, that tends to slow things down. > * I started work on unicode support, but realized that it requires a > transition period. In current CVS, it's broken just enough to make life > difficult. > * The code isn't structured all that well. This is at least partially because > we don't have good automated tests, so it's hard to refactor without breaking > things. > * We're still using CVS :-)
Thanks for bringing up these issues to get development started again. I didn't intend to hijack your thread... I'm interested in collaborating with you going forward if you're interested in the same. I will attempt to migrate my git repo to hg if that's what you want, although I haven't used hg before, so it will be new for me. I am reluctant to publish the code under the rdiff-backup name if you are not interested in working on the new codebase. How would you like me to handle that? Would you like a copy of the code so you can have a look over it before you make any decisions? It's still pretty new, and there is definitely more work to do to implement the features I have planned and to bring it up to par on all of the currently supported platforms. A little background on why I went down this road: you may remember my posts back in Feb on the full-verify patch. I had a working patch that I had contributed and started using on my system. I was very careful when I developed that patch because I wanted it to be useful on a production system. Then, the first time I tried to start a new repository with that patch applied I got all kinds of strange errors. This really made me worried because I had no idea why it happened--the errors just didn't make any sense. Since then, I tried again with the same setup, and it worked the second time! That's even more frightening... to me it says there is something non-deterministic in the design of rdiff-backup (it could be something in my setup too, although I've gone over it and even run it by others many times). Since then I've been using a version of rdiff-backup 1.2.8 with my full-verify patch (and some minor tweaks), and its been working well. Surprisingly, and somewhat unbelievably, the new verify mechanism detected a hard drive going bad on my system, so I'm glad I'm using it. Soon after the verify started failing I had other warnings as well (rsync started failing too) so it's not like I wouldn't have known if I didn't have the full-verify, but it gave me the earliest warning. After that experience I decided that I would try a redesign to see how far I could get. If it never goes anywhere, no problem, it has been fun to solve the problems and learn how the rsync algorithm works and is used in rdiff-backup. But I think this new design is much cleaner, and opens up a lot of potential for long-awaited features to be added to rdiff-backup. I'm be interested to hear your thoughts. ~ Daniel
_______________________________________________ rdiff-backup-users mailing list at rdiff-backup-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/rdiff-backup-users Wiki URL: http://rdiff-backup.solutionsfirst.com.au/index.php/RdiffBackupWiki
