[ale] Backup software incompatible versions

[DJ-Pfulio]

it seems like a failure from the rdiff-backup team to consider
non-trivial situations. A dependent librsync1 seems to be missing to
support the older python2-based version on newer releases, so the quick
solution to just move the older rdiff-backup code to the new release
isn't working.

Haven't looked into getting the librsync code and compiling myself.
Hope it doesn't have many dependencies, though libssh would be
expected.  
Just built librsync-0.9.7. No issues.  Moving on to the next step.

At least my fresh 20.04 install has python2.7 pre-installed.




On Tue, 19 May 2020 09:38:33 -0400
Derek Atkins via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> Solomon Peachy <pizza at shaftnet.org> writes:
> 
> > On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 11:28:57AM -0400, Derek Atkins via Ale
> > wrote:  
> >> maintaining both versions!   F32 still has 1.2.8 so I can't (yet)
> >> file a bug, but apparently CentOS/RHEL/EPEL has already been
> >> updated!  
> >
> > Eh?  F32 shipped with 2.0.0, and just saw 2.0.3 come through
> > updates.  
> 
> Hmm, maybe I missed that.  Oops.
> 
> > I believe F31 is also shipping 2.x now, and F30 has the COPR.  
> 
> OH GOOD.  That means I can go file a bug at RH against F31 that the
> upgrade broke my backups!
> 
> >> Still, completely frustrating that the wire protocol is
> >> incompatible.  :( Very poor software engineering choice, IMHO.  
> >
> > I suspect the incompatibility was forced upon them by dependencies
> > in the Python2->3 transition (eg py2 strings and py3 strings are
> > not compatible), and working around that would have required a 
> > disproportionate amount of work.  
> 
> IIRC they were able to work around the string issue; I think the
> bigger issue is the pickle format changed in an incompatible way.
> 
> 
> >  - Solomon  
> 
> -derek