I've just released version 0.28 of Obnam, my backup application. The relevant part of NEWS:

• force-lock should now remove all locks.
• Out-of-space errors in the repository now terminate the backup process. Previously, Obnam would continue, ignoring the failure to write. If you make space in the repository and restart Obnam, it will continue from the previous checkpoint.
• The convert5to6 black box test now works even if run by other people than liw.
• "obnam backup" now uses a single SFTP connection to the backup repository, rather than opening a new one after each checkpoint generation. Thanks to weinzwang for reporting the problem.
• "obnam verify" now obeys the --quiet option.
• "obnam backup" no longer counts chunks already in the repository in the uploaded amount of data.

The Online Photographer has a meta-article on some discussion in the photography world. Summary: someone wrote an opinion piece on one site, and people on the discussion forum of another site got his name wrong, possibly repeatedly. And the quality of the discussion went down from there.

The quality of the discourse of free software development is frequently of some concern. Debian has a reputation as being a host to, er, particularly vigorous discussions. That reputation is not unwarranted, but, I think, we've improved a lot since 2005. The problem is hardly restricted to Debian, however.

How can we improve this? I don't know. As a community, I'm not even sure we agree what the problems are. Here's my list.

• unshakeable, dogmatic opinions; an unwillingness to consider others' points of view or their justifications; willful ignorance of anything that contradicts with the way one wants things to be; an uncompromising, winner-takes-all, last-poster-wins attitude to debates; in short, a lack of respect for anyone who isn't on one's own side
• an (unintended?) emphasis on discussion speed, leading to short missives, written quickly, without much thought, and without giving even a glimpse of how the conclusion or opinion was formed; this further leads to discussions that are hard to follow, because there are so many messages to read (the total word count would probably be about the same if everyone only wrote one or two essays)
• few good ways of dealing with bad behavior, unless it fits into some clear categories of bad behavior; no clear community consensus of what is acceptable behavior, outside of a small core that is obvious (there's probably several PhD's worth of reasons for this, and it's not just because of "geeks don't understand social interaction" or "everyone is from a different cultural background")

Insults, personal attacks, and other such outrageously bad behavior is uncommon. It crosses the line so clearly it becomes easy to deal with; I don't think handling this needs much attention.

What can we do about this? I'm not sure. I have, for the time being, abandonded Debian mailing lists as a way to influence what goes on in the project, but that's just a way for me to clear some space in my head and time in my day to actually do things.

My pet hypothetical solution of the day is that mailing lists might raise the quality of the debates by limiting the number of messages written by each person per day in each thread. This might, I think, induce people to write with more thought and put more effort into making each message count.

I've just released version 0.27 of Obnam, my backup application. The relevant part of NEWS:

• The repository format has again changed in an incompatible manner, so you will need to re-backup everything again. Alternatively, you can try the new convert5to6 subcommand. See the manual page for details. Make sure you have a copy of the repository before converting, the code is new and may be buggy.
• New option --small-files-in-btree enables Obnam to store the contents of small files in the per-client B-tree. This is not the default, at least yet, since it's impact on real life performance is unknown, but it should make things go a bit faster for high latency repository connections.
• Some SFTP related speed optimizations.
• Data filtering is now strictly stable and priority-ordered, ensuring that compression always happens before encryption etc.
• Repository metadata is never filtered, so that we can be sure that in future if when we add backwards-compatibility we can detect the format without worrying about any other filtering which might occur.
• Forcing of locks is now unconditional and across the entire repository.
• Uses the larch 0.30 read-only mode to fix a bug where opening a B-tree rolls back changes someone else is making, even if we only use the tree to read stuff from.
• "obnam backup" will now exit with a non-zero exit code if there were any errors during a backup, and the problematic files were skipped. Thanks, Peter Palfrader, for reporting the bug.
• "obnam forget" is now a bit faster.
• Hash collisions for filenames are now handled.

Obnam is my backup program. See http://liw.fi/obnam/ for details.

Debian is hopefully going to be freezing the current testing version in June, in preparation for a release late this year. I'd like Obnam 1.0 to be included. In preparation for that I reviewed the currently open bugs and tagged the ones that I think are blockers.

See list of 1.0 blocker bugs.

Did I miss anything? Is anything there that isn't really a blocker?

Other than that, the roadmap for 1.0 has the following things that aren't done yet:

• Verification test
• Performance

Performance is one of those things that's always going to be a problem. I'm hoping to optimize the sftp performance a big, but apart from that, I don't consider it to be a blocker for 1.0. The verification test I'm confident I will pass, but it needs to actually be performed. (See the roadmap for details of the test.)

Anyone else have opinions of what needs to be done for Obnam 1.0?

PS. There's a mailing list for Obnam now.

Soile made a short film, Earth 2.0 last week, for a film camp thing here in Manchester. It was all done in a couple of days.

Earth 2.0 from Soile Mottisenkangas on Vimeo.

She's also set up a cafepress shop for those who want to support her filmmaking.

I got into a discussion recently about what a Linux distribution actually is. To some people, a distro is just a convenient way of source of binaries from which to pick what you install, either on your own computer or when creating an embedded system, or some other specific kind of system. To others it's a way of life, and the realization of the ideals of software freedom. To yet others, a distro is an outdated concept that will go away in the near-ish future, to be replaced by ... something.

Here's my take: a Linux distribution is defined by the following things:

• It's a specific, chosen set of upstream projects. The selection criteria vary wildly between distros, and may be based on things like purpose, quality, licenses, etc. Debian, for example, chooses pretty much everything that is free software, but a distro targeted at providing NAS devices would choose a much smaller set.
• It's a set of changes made to the upstream code, and specific configurations of the upstream code, in order make all the software work well together. For example, if the distro supports multiple mail transport agents, they might all need to be patched and configured to store incoming mail the same way by default.
• It's the tools, processes, policies, and workflows used to develop the distribution.
• It's the tools provided to the people using the distribution to install and manage their systems.
• It's the people and companies who develop the distribution and support its users, and their shared values and purpose. This may be a real community, or just the kind of community that exists as a web page.

Historically, there has been a lot of variation in all aspects mentioned above. Some of this variation may today be unnecessary. For example, it might be helpful for more distributions to share work on common tools, so that not everyone needs to re-invent and re-implement the same kinds of tools. However, my gut feeling is that due to the inherent interconnectedness of all things, it may be very difficult to have one set of tools to support well all workflows, policies, processes, and communities.

The most important differentiating factors between the various distros are not the tools, but the community values, the perceived purpose of the distro, and the resultant criteria for choosing what to include and the workflow for developing the distro.

Even when two distros use the same tools, there can be a lot of difference in the end result. Fedora and RHEL, for example, use a lot of the same infrastructure, but their purpose is entirely different. Debian and Ubuntu use mostly the same packages, even, and still there's a huge difference between the two distros: one aims at a high quality system based on free software, the other aims to support the business of one particular company.

For this reason, there will always be a lot of Linux distributions around, and that is good.

I've been using the Getting Things Done personal productivity system for myself for some years now, and have now written up my understanding and experiences of it as a little website.

Gettings Things Done For Hackers, for your reading pleasure. Any feedback welcome, preferably by e-mail or as comments on the site.

It's the World Backup Day today. As the Obnam author, I can wholly agree.

(If you think you've seen this before, think of it is a blog post that has been restored from one year ago.)

I've just released version 0.26 of Obnam, my backup application. The relevant part of NEWS:

• Clients now lock the parts of the backup repository they're using, while making any changes, so that multiple clients can work at the same time without corrupting the repository.
• Now depends on a larch 0.28, which uses journalling to avoid on-disk inconsistencies and corruption during crashes.
• Compression and encryption can now be used together.

Branchable, the Ikiwiki hosting service by Joey Hess and myself, is going non-corporate. See link for details.

I'll also mention that our offer of the first month being free for the basic plan continues, as is the offer to host a wiki or blog for free software projects.