On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Steve Wray <[email protected]> wrote: > Right, so the LATEST most up-to-date version of Debian uses a 3 year old > version of amanda. Fantastic, thanks Debian for keeping things so 'stable'.
To be fair, that's exactly the intent, and maintaining a Linux distribution is *not* easy. All of the binary-only distros are "behind the times" to varying degrees, although Debian is usually bringing up the rear of the bunch. > I downloaded the actual latest stable version of amanda (2.6.1p2 from > November 2009), compiled it and tested it. > > No bug. Yay! > Thanks, Debian package maintainer. Not. > > Backup software is mission critical. Failing to track the upstream to this > extent is simply unforgivable. I'm revising my opinion of Debian. I hear from a *lot* of folks on #amanda in exactly the same situation as you. Please do consider contacting the maintainer, or perhaps other Debian maintainers that might be able to poke the maintainer more effectively. I, as an upstream developer, don't have much impact on distro maintainers - apparently "why don't you ship the latest release?!" is a common refrain from upstreams. Distros aren't democracies, but they do listen to their users, and if enough people are asking "why hasn't Amanda been bumped in 3 years?" then someone with commit access will step up to take care of it. If there are Amanda bugs that are holding back a version bump, please let me know. At the moment, I only see two open bugs, one from 2006 and one from 2008, neither of which is blocking a bump. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=500364 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=370319 Dustin -- Open Source Storage Engineer http://www.zmanda.com
