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.
  • see http://liw.fi/larch/ for more information
  • see http://liw.fi/larch/NEWS/ for changes
• 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.
  • see http://braawi.org/obnam/ for more information

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).

Imagine you have a device, such as a linux phone, that allows login via ssh, e.g. when on a wireless network. You don t want to set a password with the (limited) phone UI. On the other hand, you don t want to allow passwordless root logins into your phone. But you do want the ability to login via ssh, after all that s why you have bought a linux smartphone. This led me to the idea of a pam module and corresponding UI piece that asks the currently logged in user: Hey, someone tries to login. Is that ok or not? This might also be useful for guest accounts on regular laptops. For more on that, see my last blog post.So I hacked it together (actually twice, due to some unfortunate use of rm at some point), invested most of the time in learning more about the python garbage collector vs. callbacks, explicitly marked global variables and proper automake stuff. In the end I got, well, just what I wanted. A simple pam module, dubbed pam-dbus that sends a request via the dbus system bus and an autostart program (written in python for now, but I might re-implement it in C) that uses notification-daemon to get confirmation from the user.You are welcome to try the sources and binary debian packages or have a look at the darcs repository for pam-dbus (with debian/ directory, repository browser). This will end up in Debian later, I guess.Update: Erik Johansson pointed out that if you want to use this with ssh, you need to set UsePAM yes in /etc/ssh/ssd_config.