[[!tag obnam]]

From the depths of the Andromeda galaxy I bring you version 0.19 of the backup program called Obnam, just released and travelling to the Terran Internet faster than light!

This is a BETA release. Some day soon it may well end up being in Debian, unless you prevent that by reporting bugs faster than I can fix them. Meanwhile, my code.liw.fi has .debs for amd64, i386, and armel. Or you can install it from source, presumably (I never do).

The NEWS items as listed below.

INCOMPATIBILITY CHANGES:

  • We now require version 0.21 of the larch library, and this requires bumping the repository format. This means old backup repositories can't be used with this version, and you need to back up everything again. (Please tell me when this becomes a problem.)

BUG FIXES:

  • Found one more place where a file going missing during a backup may cause a crash.
  • Typo in error message about on-disk formats fixed. (Thanks, Tapani Tarvainen.)
  • The --trace option works again.
  • fcntl.F_SETFL does not seem to work on file descriptors for files owned by root that are read-only to the user running obnam. Worked around by ignoring any problems with setting the flags.
  • The funnest bug in this release: if no log file was specified with --log, the current working directory was excluded from the backup.

USER VISIBLE CHANGES:

  • obnam(1) manual page now discusses how configuration files are used.
  • The manual page describes problems using sftp to access live data.
  • The documentation for --no-act was clarified to say it only works for `forget. (Thanks, Daniel Silverstone.)
  • obnam-benchmark now has a manual page.
  • The backup plugin logs files it excludes, so the user can find out what's going on. A confused user is an unhappy user.

INTERNAL STUFF:

  • Tracing statements added to various parts of the code, to help debug mysterious problems.
  • All exceptions are derived from obnamlib.AppException or obnamlib.Error, and those are derived from cliapp.AppException, so that the user gets nicer error messages than Python stack traces.
  • blackboxtests is no longer run under fakeroot, because Debian packages are built under fakeroot, and fakeroot within fakeroot causes trouble. However, the point of running tests under fakeroot was to make sure certain kinds of bugs are caught, and since Debian package building runs the tests anyway, the test coverage is not actually diminished.
  • The Makefile has new targets fast-check and network-tests. The latter runs tests over sftp to localhost.