The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Sakirnth Nagarasa (sakirnth)
• Philip Rinn (rinni)
• Arnaud Rebillout (arnaudr)
• Marcos Talau (talau)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Xiao Sheng Wen
• Andrea Pappacoda
• Robin Jarry
• Ben Westover
• Michel Alexandre Salim

Congratulations!

I have just released version 1.20 of Obnam, my backup program. It's been nine months since the previous release, and that's a long time: I've had an exciting year, and not entirely in a good way. Unfortuntely that's eaten up a lot of my free time and enthusiasm for my hobby projects. See below for a snippet of NEWS, with a summary of the user-visible changes. A lot of the effort has gone into improving FORMAT GREEN ALBATROSS, but that isn't documented in the NEWS file. I've received patches and actionable bug reports from a number of people, and I'm grateful for those. I try to credit them by name in the NEWS file. Obnam NEWS This file summarizes changes between releases of Obnam. NOTE: Obnam has an EXPERIMENTAL repository format under development, called green-albatross-20160813. It is NOT meant for real use. It is likely to change in incompatible ways without warning. DO NOT USE it unless you're willing to lose your backup. Version 1.20, released 2016-10-29

• The format name for green-albatross is renamed to green-albatross-20160813 and will henceforth be renamed every time there's a change, to avoid confusing Lars because of backwards incompatibilities. When it reaches stability and the on-disk format is frozen, it'll be renamed back to a date-less version.
• Those using the experimental green-albatross repository format will have to start over with fresh repositories. This release contains backwards incompatible changes that mean existing repositories no longer work. Sorry, but that's what experimental means.
• A green-albatross change is that the "chunk index" data structure is no longer a single blob, and instead it's broken down into smaller objects. This avoids keeping all of the chunk indexes in memory at once, which should reduce memory use.
• Remi Rampin started updating and continuing the French translation of the Obnam manual.
• Lars Wirzenius changed the default so that Obnam reads random data when creating encryption key from /dev/urandom instead of /dev/random. The goal is to make it less likely that Obnam stops at the key generation stage on machines with little entropy. Set weak-random = no in your configuration to override this.

Minor changes:

• Lars Wirzenius changed obnam forget so that if there is nothing to do, it doesn't even try to connect to the repository.
• Lars Wirzenius added a chapter on participating in the Obnam project to the manual.
• Lars Wirzenius changed --one-file-system to work for bind mounts. It only works for bind mounts that exist at the time when Obnam starts, however. Also, /proc/mounts must be an accurate list of mount points.
• Lars Wirzenius added the gpg command line to the error message about gpg failing.

Bug fixes:

• The manual and manual page used to claim you could break only the locks for one client. This was not true. The manuals has been fixed.
• A whole bunch of typo fixes, from Andrea Gelmini.
• Michel Alexandre Salim fixed a bug in the FUSE (obnam mount) plugin, which was a typo in a method name (get_clientgeneration_ids).
• Lars Wirzenius fixed obnam restore to require a target set with --to. Jonathan Dowland reported the problem.
• Lars Wirzenius fixed obnam list-errors so that it doesn't crash on error classes that only exist to make the exception hierarchy neater, such as EncryptionError. Bug reported by Rik Theys.
• Ian Cambell fixed a bug in obnam kdirstat and its handling of FIFO sockets.

I have just released version 1.9 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian. Due to the freeze of Debian for the jessie release, I've not uploaded this version to Debian yet (not experimental and not backports). This is the first Obnam release since May 13, 2014, 313 days ago. That's a long time. I make no excuses: Obnam is a hobby project, which I work on when I have the time and energy. The past year has been very /interesting/ year for me, in all sorts of stressful ways: I've changed jobs, moved to another country, and dealt with the loss of a close relative. Because of this, I've not been able to spend as much time on Obnam as I'd like. The NEWS file extract below gives the highlights of what has happened to Obnam during this time. There's been a lot of things, actually. My plans for Obnam next are mainly centered around performance. This will require developing a new repository format, to allow things that are not possible with the current format. For example, the current format stores each data chunk in its own file in the repository, and that is quite wasteful when live data files (and therefore their chunks) are quite small. As preparation for this work, the silly-looking "simple" format has been added, mostly to make sure the internal code infrastructure is ready to support multiple repository formats in the same Obnam version. Those interested in discussing ways to make Obnam fast should join the obnam-dev mailing list. Version 1.9, released 2015-03-22 New features:

• James Vasile changed Obnam so it can backup an individual file, instead of an entire directory.
• James Vasile added the --include option to Obnam, allowing one to include files that would otherwise be excluded (see --exclude).
• Carlo Teubner changed obnam fsck to remove unused chunks, if the --fsck-fix or --fsck-rm-unused settings are used. He also made it not check for unused chunks when it's useless to do so, because of various --fsck-skip settings are used.
• A start of a French translation of the manual by pedrito2.
• Ian Cambell provided a new Obnam command, obnam kdirstat, which makes the KDE k4dirstat utility be able to show graphically which parts of a backup generation use most space.
• Lars Wirzenius added the simple repository format, which is for demonstration only. It is much too simplistic to be used for real.

Minor changes:

• The manual page and obnam --help are now clearer that the --root setting and command line arguments to obnam backup can be SFTP URLs. Thanks to Simone Piccardi for reporting the issue.
• David Fries filled in the displayed file permission mode bits.
• Grammar and typo fixes for the obnam.1 manual page, from Jean Jordaan.
• Tom Chiverton suggested a clarification to the manual page for "obnam mount" to say that each generation is a subdirectory.
• David Fries changed restore to set the group ownership if possible even when not root. No warnings are issued if the attempt fails.
• Jan Niggemann added a little to the German translation of the Obnam manual.
• Lars Wirzenius added the path to the error message about a missing chunk (R43272X).
• Lars Wirzenius made the message at the end of a backup report more statistics about transfers during the backup.

Bug fixes:

• The Obnam SFTP plugin would loop infinitely if it lost the connection to the SSH server while creating a temporary file. Itamar Turner-Trauring provided a fix for this.
• Will Dyson fixed a bug about locking while removing checkpoint generations.
• Michel Alexandre Salim fixed a Python 2.6 compatibility problem in the unit tests (use of assertRaises as a context manager).
• Lars Kruse fixed a bug with backing up of overlapping backup roots (e.g., / and /boot), given a test case by Adrien Clerc.
• Thomas Eschenbacher fixed a bug in the format 6 repository code that would crash when there is an obscure problem and a B-tree code can't be found in the tree.
• Tom Chiverton pointed out that the manual page was using "obnam restore" instead of "obnam mount" in an example for "obnam mount".
• The yarn test suite now runs FUSE tests (obnam mount) when fusermount is available, rather than checking for membership in the group fuse. The latter is a Debianism (fixed in Debian jessie).
• Thomas Waldmann noticed that obnam verify didn't notice that a file had new data, when the modification time was the same. Obnam now notices this.
• Thomas Waldmann fixed many typos and minor bugs in the source code.
• Laurence Perkins reported that the Tahoe-LAFS SFTP server returned some stat fields as None. Fixed to change those to be 0 instead.
• Lars Wirzenius fixed double-downloading of chunks during restores.