blog.liw.fi/ posts/ Obnam version 0.15 and 0.15.1, and btree/larch 0.19

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Lars Wirzenius

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I've just made a couple of software releases:

  • larch version 0.19. This used to be known as btree, but others are using that name, so I changed it. This is my copy-on-write B-tree library for Python.
  • obnam version 0.15, and then the obligatory brown paper bag version 0.15.1 to fix a build issue under pbuilder. Obnam is my backup program.

This is the first release of Obnam this year. Below is a summary of the changes.

My apt repository has binary packages for amd64, i386, and armel. I've started mentoring someone to help me maintain the Debian packages, and hope to start uploading Obnam and its dependencies to Debian within a few weeks.

Obnam is still in ALPHA, but the only missing thing for moving to BETA is encryption support. There's a bunch of bugs that need to be fixed, but I'm not going to block the BETA on them. I'd be very interested to hear any feedback on this version.

Bugs fixed:

  • Manual page GPL copyright blurb is now properly marked up as a comment. (Thanks, Joey Hess.)
  • README now links to python-lru correctly. (Thanks, Erik Johansson.)

Improvements and other changes:

  • Filenames and directories are backed up in sorted order. This should make it easier to know how far obnam's gotten.
  • The location where backups are stored is now called the repository, instead of the store. Suggested by Joey Hess.
  • The repository and the target directory for restored data are now both created by Obnam, if they don't already exist. Suggested by Joey Hess.
  • Better control of logging, using the new --trace option.
  • Manual page now explains making backups a little better.
  • Default value for --lru-size reduced to 500, for great improvement in memory used, without, it seems, much decrease in speed.
  • obnam verify now reports success explicitly. Based on question from Joey Hess.
  • obnam verify now accepts both non-option arguments and the --root option. Suggested by Joey Hess.
  • obnam forget now accepts "generation specifiers", not just numeric generation ids. This means that obnam forget latest works.
  • I/O statistics are logged more systematically.
  • obnam force-lock introduced, to allow breaking a lock left behind if obnam crashes. But it never does, of course. (Well, except if there's a bug, like when a file changes at the wrong moment.)
  • obnam genids introduced, to list generation ids without any other data. The old command obnam generations still works, and lists other info about each generation as well, but that's sometimes bad for scripting.
  • The --dump-memory-profile option now accepts the value simple, for reporting basic memory use. It has such a small impact that it's the default.
  • Obnam now stores the version of the on-disk format in the repository. This should allow it to handle repositories created by a different version and act suitably (hopefully without wiping all your backups).