Hello, Having used tahoe for a little while now, I've come up with a wish list of things that that would improve my user experience. Many of these may already be tickets; I haven't browsed through the open tickets to look for things like these. This looks like a top-ten list, but they're in no particular order.
1) I wish tahoe would save symlinks as symlinks. Sometimes I create a directory full of symlinks pointing to other files, in order not to waste disk space on copies of the files. If I tahoe backup such a directory and my hard drive crashes, I can't restore my pile of symlinks as a pile of symlinks. I'll get extra copies of the files instead. 2) tahoe backup dies on broken symlinks. I would prefer if it happily saved the broken symlink (as a symlink). 3) In general, tahoe stops when it encounters a serious error. Often it could and should keep going. For example: - tahoe backup stops on a locked file or a broken symlink. Don't stop! Just skip the one file, and tell me. - tahoe deep-check --repair stops when it can't repair a file. Don't stop! Skip only what's necessary, and tell me. (There's no practical way for me to resume a repair operation immediately "after" the bad file.) - tahoe backup gives a fatal BackupProcessingError if it sees a file, but the file is deleted before tahoe backs it up. 4) Error messages should always identify what file was being worked on when the problem occurred. Sometimes they do, but often they don't. 5) I am nervous about synchronization between backupdb.sqlite and the grid. As happened recently, if a large chunk of the grid goes down, some files may go below their minimum number of shares. I could repair those files by re-uploading them, but the backupdb assumes those files are fine. So those files won't be reuploaded and they'll stay broken on the grid -- possibly forever. I'll think they're backed up, but they aren't! I'd like to have some way for a deep-check to inject a dose of reality into my backupdb. 6) For extra credit, I'd like behavior that's a hybrid between backup and deep-check. Run a backup operation, but check every file as we go along, and repair or re-upload the file if the grid doesn't have enough shares. 7) I'd like to be able to pass verify caps to deep-check on the command line. (I heard that this is implemented, but not for the command line.) 8) I'd like to have better lease control. For example, I'd like to have my Latest backup live "forever" but to assign garbage collection dates to the earlier backups. This would allow me to keep, say, weekly backups for the past month, and quarterly backups for the rest of the year. I would expect to do my own scripting to make this happen. I realize I could mostly get this with careful use of tahoe rm, but then my files are inaccessible immediately, whereas I'd rather the older backups be allowed to stick around until a garbage collection is run. "You may delete these files at your convenience, but please keep them until you need the space." 9) I wish the prodgrid helper was working. I've never been able to use it (not even once) since I started using tahoe. 10) I wish tahoe backup --exclude could accept a pathname, not just a filename. (I would like to --exclude $HOME/foo/bar as a named directory, instead of excluding files named 'bar' wherever they may exist.) -- Kyle Markley _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list [email protected] http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
