Hi there, On Fri, 2 Oct 2026, backuppc@kosowsky... wrote:
Have you let AI loose on the BackupPC codebase
No. Others have, at least on parts of it, for example https://github.com/backuppc/rsync-bpc/issues/50 which at the time I found astonishing. Now I'm getting used to it.
to: - Identify bugs & vulnerabilities - Improve robustness, logging, etc (wherever you think there is a lag) - Identify speed/efficiency improvements - including possibly moving other code to C to make it faster (if it would give a significant speedup)
All the areas you mention could fruitfully be investigated, and for my own purposes in particular I would like to improve some of the logging and log configuration as thesedays I seem to be spending time that I'd rather use elsewhere just tweaking log output. Hopefully now that I'm a lot more familiar with things that won't be so much of an issue for me, but for others who come along after me I've already felt the pain. BackupPC version 4 uses Perl::XS to do most of the heavy lifting, so I think we're well into diminishing returns on speed improvement effort just by converting Perl code to C. Having said that, there's a Github issue here https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/issues/390 which could turn into a nicely self-contained project for someone who wants to try out their own or their AI's skills. Be warned, however, that it's likely to be a very intrusive patchset and it would need a lot of testing before being released into the wild. The ultimate hope would be to provide significant improvements both to speed and storage capacity virtually for free. Obviously whatever code comes out of the exercise would need for the foreseeable future to be able to recognize and handle files that are compressed either with Zlib or with Zstd. The two most important parts that use C extensively are rsync-bpc and BackupPC-XS. Most of rsync-bpc has already been scrutinized fairly thoroughly by AI as part of the recent rsync efforts but there's still a bunch of code in there that's specific to BackupPC and in some areas of which I have niggling doubts. If anyone is willing to put in some effort prompting their pet AI to look at this stuff I'd be more than happy to look at the results. -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
