Assessment of the iteration that has ended

The goal of the previous iteration was:

The goal of this iteration is to improve the benchmark and try to make Obnam faster. Also, we need to re-start Obnam development.

This was completed. There is a benchmark results page on the web site. We made release 0.5.0.

Discussion

Minimum supported Rust version

The discussion about minimum supported Rust version for Obnam, in obnam#137, needs to be resolved. Lars suggests 1.56.0, which is currently what is in the Debian "testing" distribution, and slated to be in the next Debian release. Opinions on this are welcome, especially form a non-Debian point of view.

Policy for cargo deny

The Obnam release process now uses cargo deny to check for vulnerabilities in dependencies (both direct and indirect), for license incompatibilities, and more. The current policy is very permissive. Lars made the decision to start with a lax policy, and tighten it up over time to avoid suddenly creating a lot of work for the Obnam project.

In obnam#157 there is a discussion of how the policy should be tightened. Feedback there most welcome.

Goals

Goal for 1.0 (not changed this iteration)

The goal for version 1.0 is for Obnam to be an utterly boring backup solution for Linux command line users. It should just work, be performant, secure, and well-documented.

It is not a goal for version 1.0 to have been ported to other operating systems, but if there are volunteers to do that, and to commit to supporting their port, ports will be welcome.

Other user interfaces is likely to happen only after 1.0.

The server component will support multiple clients in a way that doesn’t let them see each other’s data. It is not a goal for clients to be able to share data, even if the clients trust each other.

Goal for the next few iterations (not changed for this iteration)

The goal for next few iterations is to have Obnam be performant. This will include, at least, making the client use more concurrency so that it can use more CPU cores to compute checksums for de-duplication.

Goal for this iteration (new for this iteration)

The goal of this iteration is to get a better picture of where the performance bottlenecks currently are.

Commitments for this iteration

We collect issues for this iteration in milestone 11.

Lars intends to work on the following issues for this iteration:

• obnam#132 -- A non-existent backup root should be treated as an error, not a warning
  • 1h
• obnam#147 -- obnam.md could do with an easier way to set for a scenario
  • 1h
• obnam#158 -- Lacks benchmark of incremental backup of large number of unchanged files
  • 1h
• obnam#159 -- Lacks a baseline benchmark result with release 0.4.0
  • 1h
• obnam#160 -- Needs a release with changes after 0.5.0
  • 1h

That's a total of about 5 hours, rough estimate, for Lars.

Meeting participants

• Lars Wirzenius