On 17.02.2023 09:06, Eric Zolf wrote:
Hi,
On 17/02/2023 07:02, qx6uwum...@liamekaens.com wrote:
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 agree, this is why it has been documented in the changelog with the
prefix CHG, which exactly means "review this and act accordingly
before you update".
And I _always_ write in the release notes "Detailed release notes are
at the top of the changelog. As always, consider especially the
changes marked with CHG as they might impact your workflow." but who
reads release notes properly? :-^
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.
That isn't correct, the script will need to be changed, true, but you
can use something like:
rdiff-backup <do something>
rc = $?
if [[ $(( rc ^ (2+4+8) & rc )) -gt 0 ]]; then echo error; fi
and hence ignore anything which isn't an error (return codes 2, 4 and
8 are warnings, and they can be combined; search for "bitwise" in the
bash manpage for details).
_and_ you can do something else with the return code, which you
couldn't do before, like reporting warnings with a lower severity in
your monitoring system. In the past, a return code != 0 could mean
anything, now I'm trying to sort this out properly, so that people can
rely on it to take decisions, trigger monitoring, whatever. There is
still a lot more to be done to reach this state of bliss, but Rome
wasn't built in one day.
Getting complicated. I agree, that "No increment is older than 20D"
shouldn't be a warning, it's quite normal behaviour.
Good luck
Reio
