[Box Backup-dev] Future work

[Ben Summers]

On 25 Feb 2006, at 18:04, Chris Wilson wrote:

> Hi Martin,
>
>>> Please let me know if you would like to assign me any new feature  
>>> to work
>>> on, either for 0.11 or 0.20.
>>
>> This is open source, not work... You work on what you want to or can
>> work on, nothing is mandatory!
>
> I thought it might help to assign me something or at least agree  
> that it would be a useful thing for me to work on, especially given  
> a possible lack of connectivity and interactivity for three months :-)

I'd prefer it if people choose the bits they wanted to do. I agree  
with Martin; this is about doing stuff we want to do.

The raidfile modifications are suitable, but not very "sexy" and may  
not be to your taste. But it is highly self-contained. I think  
there's still some advantage in having them. RAID hardware isn't well  
supported on the *BSDs (slight issues such as not reporting disc  
failures!), raidframe is annoying to set up. But perhaps most  
interestingly, with a bit of extra work it would allow us to RAID the  
entire machine, not just the discs, building resilient clusters of  
three servers.

On the other hand, we could really do with a nice GUI based front  
end, so why not continue making Boxi wonderful?

>
>> Cool. Approximately how soon is 'about to go'? The logging changes  
>> are not the sort of thing that could easily be done like that  
>> because of the invasiveness. You really need something a bit more  
>> meaty that is realistic to merge afterwards.
>
> My leaving date is currently 20th March, but might be a week or two  
> later. I can try to get the logging changes done before then, but  
> no promises.

It would be useful if you wrote some notes about your idea GUI  
integration features on the wiki before you leave. I would really  
like to leave the daemon doing it's stuff, and the GUI just  
connecting over a local socket to control it. Perhaps even making a  
brestored which handles the actual talking to the server.

Have you considered having multiple users sharing the same store when  
a whole machine is being backed up?

I'm not sure whether to be amazed at your enthusiasm for Box Backup  
or worried about your sanity when I hear you're considering doing  
lots of coding for the project while traveling around the world.

Ben

PS: Some replies to your notes on the wiki.