[[!tag announcement obnam larch]]

I've just pushed out the release files for Obnam version 1.4, my backup application, and Larch, my B-tree library, which Obnam uses. They are available via my home page (http://liw.fi/). Since Debian is frozen, I am not uploading packages to Debian, but .deb files are available from my personal apt repository for intrepid explorers. (I will be uploading to Debian again after the freeze. I am afraid I'm too lazy to upload to experimental, or do backports. Help is welcome!)

From the Obnam NEWS file:

  • The`ls command now takes filenames as (optional) arguments, instead of a list of generations. Based on patch by Damien Couroussé.
  • Even more detailed progress reporting during a backup.
  • Add --fsck-skip-generations option to tell fsck to not check any generation metadata.
  • The default log level is now INFO, instead of DEBUG. This is to be considered a quantum leap in the continuing rise of the maturity level of the software. (Actually, the change is there just to save some disk space and I/O for people who don't want to be involved in Obnam development and don't want to have massive log files.)
  • The default sizes for the lru-size and upload-queue-size settings have been reduced, to reduce the memory impact of Obnam.
  • obnam restore now reports transfer statistics at the end, similarly to what obnam backup does. Suggested by "S. B.".

Bug fixes:

  • If listing extended attributes for a filesystem that does not support them, Obnam no longer crashes, just silently does not backup extended attributes. Which aren't there anyway.
  • A bug in handling stat lookup errors was fixed. Reported by Peter Palfrader. Symptom: AttributeError: 'exceptions.OSError' object has no attribute 'st_ino' in an error message or log file.
  • A bug in a restore crashing when failing to set extended attributes on the restored file was fixed. Reported by "S. B.".
  • Made it clearer what is happening when unlocking the repository due to errors, and fixed it so that a failure to unlock is also an error. Reported by andrewsh.
  • The dependency on Larch is now for 1.20121216 or newer, since that is needed for fsck to work.
  • The manual page did not document the client name arguments to the add-key and remove-key subcommands. Reported by Lars Kruse.
  • Restoring symlinks as root would fail. Reported and fixed by David Fries.
  • Only set ssh user/port if explicitily requested, otherwise let ssh select them. Reported by Michael Goetze, fixed by David Fries.
  • Fix problem with old version of paramiko and chdir. Fixed by Nick Altmann.
  • Fix problems with signed vs unsigned values for struct stat fields. Reported by Henning Verbeek.