As there are some bugs waiting for being fixed, a bug squashing party will take place this weekend. It will start on Friday (2006/04/21, 20:00 UTC) and will stop on monday (2006/04/24, 20:00 UTC). During this timescale, every patch submited before the end of the party will be applied on tuesday, if the patch is granted. Moreover, the team will try to fix as many bugs as possible, enhancement items will be applied, if accepted too. The goal of that event is to speed-up the release of backup-manager 0.7.3 and to prepare the next stable release: 0.8.
Any kind of help is welcome during this event, testers, documentation writers and developers, you are welcome. If you want to give a hand, come on irc.oftc.net, chanel #backup-manager during the weekend.
See you online, happy hacking.

Brad Dixon is working on a patch for backup-manager in order to support the Amazon S3 Web Service as a new upload method. His work is almost finished in the current SVN source tree and will be available in the next development release: 0.7.3. The Amazon Web Service Blog speaks about his work. Well done Brad and welcome aboard!

I’m glad to say that bugzilla 2.20.1 is now available in sid. It provides a couple of security fixes and fixes some packaging issues as well. I now have to contact the security team for uploading a security update for our sarge version…

Andreas Gredler, who gave a talk at the “Chemnitzer Linux Tage” event about Backup Manager has just translated his slides in english and has published them. They are also available in german. Thank you andreas!

As you can see on this graph, my backup-manager system produces incremental backups and this leads to reduce CPU usage:
Master backups are made on monday as you can see.

As I feel like being part of the silent majority Julien spoke about, I take the time to write down what I think about that “Teletubies vs Trolls” thing. Despite of all the goodwill Rapha l is capable of, I think he’s fighting here a wall of air, and this is looking like a big waste of time. I must say that I agree with Julien on this point, all the time spent for fighting ghosts is not spent in real work. Forgive me Raphael but I think that working on technical issues is far more important than trying to set a “Debian Social Policy” - yes, let’s name it like it should be.
We have so much to do… Couldn’t we leave trolls out of this? Just let them cry and yell and scream, just don’t pay attention to them. I still think this is the very best behaviour to adopt. Well, just do not feed the trolls.

Andreas “jimmy” Gredler - who contributed to the backup-manager source tree - will give a talk about Backup Manager at the “Chemnitzer Linux Tage” event. The talk is entitled: “Backups einfach gemacht mit Backup Manager” and will cover the main design of the program.

After setting up the Backup Manager’s website, I took the time to install mailman in order to handle mailing lists nicely (congrats to the mailman maintainer, it installs itself like a charme). Everything is now ready for welcoming subscribers to the backup-manager mailing lists. I’m about to release a new version of Backup Manager, featuring a new method for making customized backup: you are now able to enter a command and all the output sent to stdout by this command will be used as the archive content. It can then be compressed with the tool of your choice if needed. Here is an example of the concept:

command=ssh myhost -c 'mysqldump -uuser -ppass database'
filetype=sql
compressor=bzip2

This will be provided to backup-manager through arrays, so we can implement as many archive methods as we like.
I called this method the “pipe” method, I gues you know why. This is already available in the svn repository.

It’s more than a year since the first development release of Backup Manager, this easy-to-use tool for archiving your data under Linux. Version 0.6 which has just been released, provides a set of features for letting you implement your own backup strategy.
Backup Manager is able to use any existing infrastructure for achieving this goal: FTP or SSH accounts, CD/DVD burning devices…
A couple of different backup methods are available: tarballs (incremental or not), dumps (MySQL, SVN) and a generic method which uses content sent on stdout by an arbitrary command. An effort has been given regarding localisation, the program is now translated in 5 languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian and Vietnamese. The user guide has been writen and is available in different formats. Hopefully, the debian package will come very soon…

Last days have been quite productive for Backup Manager and I’m glad to see that all the development phase seems to be finished in the SVN repository. As you can see, we’ll be able to release the first stable version of Backup Manager (0.6) as soon as the user guide is written. From the code tree point of view, all the known bugs are closed by now and requested new features implemented. I put all my energy in the user guide now, and hope I could fine some english native speakers soon… I don’t plan to release a new debian package for the last 0.5.9x versions, the next debian package will be 0.6-1, and it will be backported to sarge if needed.

A new package of electricsheep is coming (uploaded this morning). This package brings a new upstream version (basically a CVS snapshot) which solves some buffer overflows. Moreover, I patched the sources in order to avoid the use of xsetbg which has a very annoying bug: it keeps opening X clients without closing the old ones. As electricsheep is a screensaver that computes new fractal animations continously, you are likely to let it run all the night for days… and that leads to consume all your X displays… I then disabled the two calls to xsetbg. In the meantime, the severity of the xloadimage bug has been raised to grave, and it has been tagged security.
I hope we could find a solution for this problem.

I’m going to travel in Europe within the next two weeks for business reasons. The first move will be in Berlin but unfortunately, it will be for a single day (next tuesday: Nov. 15).
On the other hand, I’ll come to Barcelona on the 21st of november and will stay there for two days (coming back to Paris on 22nd). That means that I’ll be on Barcelona the evening between monday and tuesday, so if there are somme DD around, feel free to contact me so we can meet ourselves, and why not, sign our GPG keys… People interested can mail me at my usual address: sukria at sukria dot net.

A new release of Backup Manager has just been published: 0.5.9b

This release provides DVD burning support with growisofs and two new
methods for generating archives: one for backing up SVN repositories
(with svnadmin), the other for making generic archives based on the
output of a given command. Some bugs have also been closed, the
generated MD5 files are now compliant with the md5 program.

The Debian package will come soon…

Today kickass’ combo : the popcon graph + the PTS I’m pretty happy to see that each new backup-manager package brings a couple of new users. As expected, each variation in the graph can be associated to an upload in the archive. Popcon graphs rock!

Yeah, the last stable release of Bugzilla is going to be available for Sid within a couple of hours (thanks Frankie). One of the major change with this release is… a new skin!
Eh Eh. You can take a look at it on the Backup Manager’s website: http://bugzilla.backup-manager.org. As I’m speaking about backup-manager, let’s say the last release (0.5.9a) is also going to be available, the package is in my sponsor’s hands. My travel through NM also follows, I just sent T&S Part #1 a couple of hours ago…