Gene Heskett wrote:
On Tuesday 09 March 2010, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
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.
[snip]
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
I'm on your side here Dustin. The distros, debian in particular need
prodding. What you use for a prod is up to you. :-)
The problem I have with submitting bug reports to Debian on this sort of
thing is this:
If the bug is not security related then its extremely unlikely to be fixed
until the NEXT stable release.
In Debian, stability means making sure that non-security bugs are
maintained throughout the lifetime of the release. The bugs are *part* of
the stability. The theory is that people may have implemented workarounds
for these bugs. If you go fixing the bug then you break their workaround.
Since, due to this (and other ongoing concerns with the 'stability'
problems of Debian), I will not be using the next stable release.
So why would I bother to point out to them that, "hey, maybe when you
release the next Debian version you use the current version of Amanda?" if
I am not going to be using that version? This would be purely altruistic...
and if Debian can't figure this out for themselves well... to be frank, I
have no time for that.
I go back 11+ years with amanda, usually running the bleeding edge as now.
Considering that I build the new snapshot and use it nightly several times a
week, the number of real bugs has been almost vanishingly small even when its
labeled as alpha, not for production use. FWIW, 90% of those were tar's
fault, not amanda's. There are several tar versions about, not all of which
are even compatible with themselves. Amanda is compatible with itself with
one exception, a format change a good 8 or 9 years ago. Folks like Dustin
and Jean-Louis write tight, and correct code. I mentally salute them as I
toss last nights printout on top of the stack (should, heaven forbid, I need
to consult it) every morning.
That reminds me; in one release of Debian the version of tar and of amanda
were incompatible! It was the 'tar gives exit status 1 if a file changed
while being read' problem IIRC.
This was NEVER fixed in that 'stable' release. I should have seen the
writing on the wall, really.
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