On 2023-02-16 21:34, Eric Zolf ewl+rdiffbackup-at-lavar.de
|rdiff-backup-users| wrote:
Hi,
On 16/02/2023 20:41, qx6uwum...@liamekaens.com wrote:
IMHO, "No increment is older than ...." is normal behavior and should
not cause a warning, especially since nonzero status codes are
considered abnormal termination by most shells (even the Python docs
<https://docs.python.org/3/library/sys.html#sys.exit> mention this),
and can cause backup scripts to terminate.
If there is a warning message, and there always was a warning message,
then it's not a "normal" behavior, at least not in my books.
For example, if you're short on disk space, want to remove some
increments, and choose the wrong selector, then you'd be happy to
notice that nothing was removed (and your next backup might fail).
So, yes, this is abnormal (or do you call the command just to have it
remove nothing?) but not a fatal error.
Check the man page of a few commands and you'll see that it's not
uncommon (ls, grep, rsync...).
KR, Eric
I really appreciate rdiff-backup and like the new command syntax, so I
don't want to sound like a whiner, but like tbsky the change to make "No
increment is older than ...." a warning and return a nonzero status code
disruptive and a big surprise.
I, and I imagine many others, run "rdiff-backup remove increments
--older-than ..." before every backup. For backups containing slowly
changing files, it reports "No increment is older than ...." most of the
time. I would guess that in all my different backups I get "No
increment is older than ...." about 1/3 of the time. I'm happy to see
the "NOTE: No increments older than ... found, exiting." message, but I
see no reason for an additional WARNING that just clutters the output of
my backup script making it more difficult to notice when there a real
problems, and especially a nonzero status code that will cause my script
to terminate unless I change the shell setting to ignore errors, which
means the script won't terminate when there is a "real" problem.
