"John R. Jackson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >I'd much
> >rather specify "gzip -9" and "gunzip" than specify "best compression"
> >or whatnot. ...
>
> But that's not the point. By adding a layer of abstraction, Amanda can
> deal with the various nastiness of what command line arguments are needed,
> what file suffix is used, etc.
But I'd rather tell it to use "/usr/bin/gzip -9" manually than let it
futz around with figuring out which gzip to use. And while it can be
changed at compile time, this isn't good enough for several reasons:
1. It means I have to keep a locally-compiled version on each of my
machines, instead of just using the default that comes with Debian.
That means that these all have to be manually recompiled and updated
whenever a newer Amanda comes out. And -- in the event of a
catastrophe -- I'd have to recompile Amanda before restoring my
dumps. (Barring manual restore by piping through bzip2 and tar.)
2. If I wish to use different compression programs for different
filesystems or configuration sets, I can't without using multiple
installations of amanda, which is a real PITA.
For instance, I might use gzip to back up machines with really slow
CPUs but use bzip to back up everything else. I'd really like to have
this choice.
> Look at all the incredible amount of effort it has to put in to deal
> with "program dump".
That's a different case. "dump" and "tar" are not so substantially
similar as gzip and bzip2, nor do they act as simple pieces of a pipe
as gzip and bzip2 do.
> In the long term, there is a FILTER-API proposal to take care of this
> at run time. Feel free to contribute to that effort.
Where can I find information about this?
--
John Goerzen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> www.complete.org
Sr. Software Developer, Progeny Linux Systems, Inc. www.progenylinux.com
#include <std_disclaimer.h> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
