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During this weekend, as expected, I spent some time working on the backup-manager source tree. Bugzilla helped me a lot for doing this job, now that I use flags to mark my bugs, this is easier for me to figure out what I have to do.

Concerning technical details, I fixed 8 bugs in the SVN tree in the last three days. In those 8 bugs, three of them were feature requests:

1. The source tree provides now a new upload method for encrypting your precious archives before storing them remotely,
2. You can now change the permissions that will be affected to your archives if you use the secure repository mode.
3. You can choose to purge locally your archives immediately after having uploaded them, thanks to a new configuration variable that set the remote time to live (opposed to the local one).

Other bugs are real issues that are now closed: duplicates purging works again, the burning system can now burn a medium successfully in any circumstances and you can safely use FTP uploads in passive mode if you’re behind a firewall.

I think that we are really close to the next development release (0.7.3), stay tuned…

It took me a while to come back to the Debian bugzilla package, sadly I didn’t have the time in the past months to pay attention to it. Bug reports were coming and coming and it was really necessary to focus on them. As this weekend is a Bug Squashing Party in the Debian community, I thought it was the perfect time to wear my armor, take my sword and go squashing bugs…

I’m now glad to announce that bugzilla 2.20.1-2 will be soon available for your sid box and provides some sweet improvements:

• The old hand-written postinst script that performs database creation has been replaced by a smart call to dbconfig-common’s hook. By the way, congrats go to Sean Finney, dbconfig-common was really easy to integrate and does well what it claims to.
• The checksetup.pl script - that is a critical point in the package installation phase - was fixed (some grave bugs) and was also enhanced in order to work gently with what the user inputed with debconf. I have to submit my patch upstream for that script…
• I also cleaned a bit the package, added some new translated debconf templates.

I think that this package will bring back a good-shaped package in debian and hope that users will agree on that. The BTS will tell us if I’m right.

Anyway, I feel better after this upload.

Thanks to the nice work of Jan Metzger, backup-manager-upload can now encrypt your archives on-the-fly during SSH uploads. That’s done with a new upload method called “ssh-gpg”.

The design is simple and effective: you specify a GPG public key to use for encryption and choose that new upload method instead of the “scp” one. Then, your archives remain unencrypted locally but are encrypted with the public key on the remote hosts.

That’s a great new feature for those who want to upload their archive to an untrusted place.

Next step: implementing the new phase in the main backup-manager process: the global encryption phase, see bug #82 for details.

As there are some bugs waiting for being fixed, a bug squashing party will take place this weekend. It will start on Friday (2006/04/21, 20:00 UTC) and will stop on monday (2006/04/24, 20:00 UTC).

During this timescale, every patch submited before the end of the party will be applied on tuesday, if the patch is granted. Moreover, the team will try to fix as many bugs as possible, enhancement items will be applied, if accepted too.

The goal of that event is to speed-up the release of backup-manager 0.7.3 and to prepare the next stable release: 0.8.
Any kind of help is welcome during this event, testers, documentation writers and developers, you are welcome. If you want to give a hand, come on irc.oftc.net, chanel #backup-manager during the weekend.
See you online, happy hacking.

Brad Dixon is working on a patch for backup-manager in order to support the Amazon S3 Web Service as a new upload method. His work is almost finished in the current SVN source tree and will be available in the next development release: 0.7.3. The Amazon Web Service Blog speaks about his work. Well done Brad and welcome aboard!

I’m glad to say that bugzilla 2.20.1 is now available in sid. It provides a couple of security fixes and fixes some packaging issues as well.

I now have to contact the security team for uploading a security update for our sarge version…