[pkg-bacula-devel] The future of bacula in Debian

[Luca Capello]

Hi Hauke!

On Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:04:00 +0100, Jan Hauke Rahm wrote:
> I've just found a few minutes to take a look at all those emails tagged
> unread in my mailbox about bacula. It appears to me that, beyond a few
> new bugs, nothing much really happened. I recall having asked for some
> review of what I did a few months back. That either got lost or no-one
> really cared.

I think the major problem is the amount of work to be done, not that no
one cares.  I remember your review requests and I thought I could find
time during the last Christmas holidays or later (I recently finished my
university job), but then Real Life™ went differently.  And FWIW there
were other Debian stuff which I, for sure wrongly, consider a bit more
important (read Events and DebConf).  So, all the shame on me ;-)

Please note that this mailing list had some offer to help us, but after
I explained a possible plan (obviously, the one I think should be
followed) no one replied.

> The current state of bacula in Debian is bad. The build system is broken
> imho (which is why I actually started working on it), so much that I
> wouldn't trust it. And I don't see anyone actually doing anything. Given
> this situation, I don't think bacula is fit for a stable release.

I am of the same opinion, even if I do not share your view about the
build system: at least the package builds, albeit (bad) lintian errors.

> Unfortunately, I have lost my biggest use case for bacula. I also
> currently don't have a working testing environment. That is party why I
> didn't reply to anything recently. I'm not sure about my future
> participation in packaging bacula.
>
> So, who is still there and how is this going to improve?

I still use Bacula on a small production environment, but with a very
simple configuration.  And despite the fact that "easier" backup
solutions have been gaining momentum (disk is cheap), I still think that
an enterprise software is better.  So, yes, I am still interested in
Bacula.

I have started to review your commits from the 'development' branch and
merging them in the 'master' branch.  At least we can reach a point
where the package will be in a better state, which is by itself an
improvement.

Just to be sure my plan is clear, here a more detailed version:

1) review/import all the patches in the 'development' branch
2) review/import all the patches in the 'development2' branch
3) upload to experimental asking for migration testing
4) import the Ubuntu package (there have been no news from the Ubuntu
   maintainer, despite the fact that they were directly Cc:ed)
5) upgrade to the new upstream version (if the Ubuntu package has not
   done that yet)
6) fix whatever has to be fixed because of the new Debian policy
7) discuss whatever I think should be done differently (I already have
   some points, but let us attack them later on)
8) upload to sid

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca
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