[tech] UCC backup status, was Re: Cron <backups at mollitz> /backups/bin/rdiff-manager/rdiff-manager.py (fwd)

[David Adam]

On Tue, 21 Jun 2022, Nick Bannon wrote:
> 6. Actually, [DAA]'s https://gitlab.ucc.asn.au/UCC/rdiff-manager does a
> great job of force-retrying failed backups all by itself, but it's time
> for us to do the python2 to python3 upgrade to get `rdiff-manager` and
> `rdiff-backup` up to date, on Debian 11 "bullseye". That's not something
> that magically happens by itself without reading release and upgrade notes.

rdiff-manager should forward-port to the newest Python fine (it uses
Python 3 at present), but the new version of rdiff-backup might make the
flags need adjusting.

When I wrote it my feeling was that it was on the border of too clever;
the run_rdiff lambda is pretty impenetrable and the OO took me a while
to get my head around looking at it again. The multiprocessing approach
was designed to make it more resilient against crashes/unhandled
exceptions; it worked reasonably well and has also done so in other
projects I've written since. The multiprocessing module is fine on Linux
(there's a landmine on macOS and I can't remember what the speed is like
on Windows).

David Adam
Recovering Wheel Member
zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
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